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Who's Responsible for the Economy? The Formation and Consequences of Responsibility Attributions
Author(s) -
Rudolph Thomas J.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/1540-5907.00049
Subject(s) - attribution , presidential system , ideology , perception , social psychology , accountability , political science , politics , context (archaeology) , moral responsibility , social responsibility , positive economics , political economy , economics , law and economics , psychology , public relations , law , paleontology , neuroscience , biology
The concept of responsibility lies at the heart of theories of democratic accountability. This article represents the first attempt to explicitly model attributions of presidential versus congressional responsibility for the economy. The article investigates the extent to which contextual and individual‐level factors influence citizens' attributions of responsibility for the economy and how, in turn, such judgments shape their political evaluations. Employing a multinomial probit model of attributional choice, I find that responsibility judgments are shaped to varying degrees by economic ideology, perceptions of institutional context, and partisanship, although the effects of partisanship are not uniform across political parties. The results demonstrate that responsibility attributions are politically consequential and moderate the effects of economic perceptions on presidential and congressional approval. Finally, the results suggest that the effects of responsibility attributions in the sanctioning process are not invariant across the target of institutional evaluation .