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Who Do Voters Blame for Policy Failure? Information and the Partisan Assignment of Blame

How do people assign blame in the wake of significant government failures? If the role of the citizenry in a representative democracy is to discipline elected officials for failing to meet collective expectations, then this question is of paramount importance. Much research suggests that the base tendency of citizens is to simply blame the other party—a normatively concerning outcome. However, some argue that information, especially that from expert and nonpartisan sources, may push citizens to overlook their party affiliation and assign blame in a more performance-based fashion. Using an experimental design, we test this possibility, manipulating whether there is unified or divided government, the partisanship of key actors, and the nature of expert information that participants receive during a hypothetical budget crisis at the state level. We find strong evidence that party weighs heavily on individuals’ minds when assigning blame, as expected. More importantly, we find that nonpartisan expert information about the situation does not live up to its potential to sway partisans from their priors. Rather, unbiased information appears to be used as a weapon—ignored when it challenges partisan expectations and used to magnify blame of the other party when it conforms with them.