Journal Article

The Attribution of Credit and Blame to Governments and Its Impact on Vote Choice

Marsh, Michael, Tilley, James

2010

Overview

This article examines how voters attribute credit and blame to governments for policy success and failure, and how this affects their party support. Using panel data from Britain between 1997 and 2001 and Ireland between 2002 and 2007 to model attribution, the interaction between partisanship and evaluation of performance is shown to be crucial. Partisanship resolves incongruities between party support and policy evaluation through selective attribution: favoured parties are not blamed for policy failures and less favoured ones are not credited with policy success. Furthermore, attributions caused defections from Labour over the 1997–2001 election cycle in Britain, and defections from the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat coalition over the 2002–07 election cycle in Ireland. Using models of vote switching and controlling for partisanship to minimize endogeneity problems, it is shown that attributed evaluations affect vote intention much more than unattributed evaluations. This result holds across several policy areas and both political systems.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Attribution / Blame / Comparative analysis / Conservatism / Credit / Decision making / Defections / Economic conditions / Economic indicators / Economic models / Economic policy / Education / Election results / Elections / Evaluation / Government / Ireland / Irish politics / Modeling / Panel data / Partisanship / Performance evaluation / Policy / Policy analysis / Policy making / Political behavior / Political Parties / Political partisanship / Political science / Political Systems / Presidents / Provincial elections / Public opinion / Success / Taxation / United Kingdom / Voters / Voting / Voting Behavior / Voting behaviour / Voting intentions