An Outbreak of Selective Attribution: Partisanship and Blame in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Crises and disasters give voters an opportunity to observe the incumbent's response and reward or punish them for successes and failures. Yet even when voters agree on the facts, they tend to attribute responsibility in a group-serving manner, disproportionately crediting their party for positive developments and blaming opponents for negative developments. Using original time series data, we show that partisan disagreement over U.S. President Donald Trump's responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic quickly 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 such 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.

Motivated Cognition in Cooperation

“…A different line of research focuses on the role of political preferences. Although some studies have reported that stronger conservatism is linked to motivated beliefs about political topics (Braman & Nelson, 2007; Caddick & Feist, 2021; Graham & Singh, 2023; Jost et al, 2003; Miller et al, 2016; Osmundsen et al, 2021; Saunders, 2017), others have failed to find such an effect (Ditto et al, 2019; Eichmeier & Stenhouse, 2019; Guay & Johnston, 2022; Kahan, 2012).…”

How to study democratic backsliding

“…Yet, there exist many sources of error that lead to misattributions. These include overweighing recent events (e.g., focusing on a recent transgression rather than a history of transgressions) (Huber et al., 2012), making attributions based on perceptions of the competence of relevant actors that may or may not be accurate (Graham & Singh, 2023), making attributions based on random events that alter one's mood (e.g., Achen & Bartels, 2016; Busby et al., 2015; Healy et al., 2010; cf. Fowler & Hall, 2018), only blaming those from the out‐party (Malhotra & Kuo, 2008), and being vulnerable to blame‐shifting rhetoric (Schlipphak et al., 2022).…”

From Anti-China Rhetoric to Anti-Asian Behavior: The Social and Economic Cost of "Kung Flu"

“…Partisans are much more likely to follow suggestions and absorb information when it is presented to them by leaders in their own party, as compared to non-partisan figures and especially figures from the opposing party. This partisan cuing effect extends to a variety of topics, including vaccination (Weisel 2021), mask-wearing (Milosh et al 2020), and COVID-19 blame attribution (Graham and Singh 2021). This suggests that Republicans, whose party leaders and media outlets engaged in anti-Asian cuing behavior, should be more likely to respond with consumer discrimination against Chinese and Asian restaurants, leading to Hy- Finally, we propose a potential mechanism for spillovers to non-Chinese Asian restaurants (such as "Tiger Belly Noodle Bar") whose names are ethnically ambiguous but could potentially be classified as Chinese.…”