Partisan Selectivity in Blame Attribution: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Elections During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Crises and disasters give voters an opportunity to observe the incumbent's response and punish or reward them for successes and failures. Yet even when voters agree on the facts, they tend to attribute responsibility in a self-serving partisan manner, disproportionately crediting their party for positive developments and blaming opponents for negative developments. Using original time series data, we show that a partisan gap over U.S. President Trump's responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly emerged alongside the pandemic's onset in March 2020. Three original survey experiments show that the valence of information about the country's performance against the virus contributes causally to these gaps. A Bayesian model of information processing anticipates our findings more closely than do theories of partisan-motivated reasoning.
These findings shed new light on the foundations of partisan loyalty, especially among citizens who do not think of themselves as partisans.

Authors

• Shikhar Singh, Yale University

• Matthew H Graham, George Washington University