IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/bjposi/v40y2010i01p115-134_99.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Marsh, Michael
  • Tilley, James

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Marsh, Michael & Tilley, James, 2010. "The Attribution of Credit and Blame to Governments and Its Impact on Vote Choice," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 40(1), pages 115-134, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:40:y:2010:i:01:p:115-134_99
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0007123409990275/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Özge Kemahlıoğlu & Reşat Bayer, 2021. "Favoring co-partisan controlled areas in central government distributive programs: the role of local party organizations," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 187(3), pages 301-319, June.
    2. Saltuk Özerturk & Huseyin Yildirim, 2019. "Credit Attribution and Collaborative Work," Departmental Working Papers 1907, Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics.
    3. Krishna Chaitanya Vadlamannati & Samuel Brazys, 2023. "Does cultural diversity hinder the implementation of IMF-supported programs? An empirical investigation," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 18(1), pages 87-116, January.
    4. Krause, Tobias Alexander & Ivanov, Igor & Sidki, Marcus, 2023. "Blame or gain? Is institutional trust impacted by the perception of political influence in state-owned enterprises?," Working Paper Series 30, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Business and Law.
    5. Baccini, Leonardo & Sudulich, Maria Laura & Wall, Matthew, 2016. "Internet effects in times of political crisis: online newsgathering and attitudes towards the European Union," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 62302, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    6. Agni Poullikka, 2024. "The 2013 Cypriot Banking Crisis and Blame Attribution: survey evidence from the first application of a bail-in in the Eurozone," GreeSE – Hellenic Observatory Papers on Greece and Southeast Europe 192, Hellenic Observatory, LSE.
    7. Matthieß, Theres, 2020. "Retrospective pledge voting: A comparative study of the electoral consequences of government parties’ pledge fulfilment," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 59(4), pages 774-796.
    8. J. S. Maloy, 2014. "Linkages of Electoral Accountability: Empirical Results and Methodological Lessons," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 2(2), pages 13-27.
    9. Berthold Rittberger & Helena Schwarzenbeck & Bernhard Zangl, 2017. "Where Does the Buck Stop? Explaining Public Responsibility Attributions in Complex International Institutions," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(4), pages 909-924, July.
    10. Lucy Martin & Pia J. Raffler, 2021. "Fault Lines: The Effects of Bureaucratic Power on Electoral Accountability," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 65(1), pages 210-224, January.
    11. Mark D. Ramirez, 2021. "Understanding public blame attributions when private contractors are responsible for civilian casualties," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 54(1), pages 21-40, March.
    12. Ching Leong & Michael Howlett, 2017. "On credit and blame: disentangling the motivations of public policy decision-making behaviour," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 50(4), pages 599-618, December.
    13. Poullikka, Agni, 2024. "The 2013 Cypriot banking crisis and blame attribution: survey evidence from the first application of a bail-in in the Eurozone," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 121228, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    14. Ozerturk, Saltuk & Yildirim, Huseyin, 2021. "Credit attribution and collaborative work," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 195(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:40:y:2010:i:01:p:115-134_99. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jps .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.