When Opponents Run Regions, Voters Rewrite Who's Responsible

Why This Question Matters

Voters in multilevel democracies often struggle to assign credit or blame because responsibilities are split across national and regional governments. Guillem Rico and Robert Liñeira ask how partisan competition and territorial attachments change the way citizens attribute responsibility for regional economic performance — and whether voters use those cues to deflect blame or claim credit.

How the Authors Study It

Rico and Liñeira combine experimental and observational evidence to probe causal mechanisms behind responsibility attributions. Their design contrasts voters' partisanship and feelings of regional attachment against the actual partisan distribution of power across national and regional governments, focusing specifically on judgments about who is responsible for the regional economy.

What They Find

• Partisan-based attribution bias is not constant: it arises primarily in regions where the regional government is controlled by a party different from the national incumbent. In those contexts, voters are more likely to shift blame away from co-partisan national incumbents and onto regional authorities controlled by the opposing party.
• Territorial identity shapes responsibility assessments selectively: citizens rationalize responsibility on the basis of territorial attachment mainly when a regional nationalist party holds regional power.

Why It Matters for Accountability and Voting

These results explain why economic voting and accountability vary across places with similar institutions: low clarity of responsibility interacts with partisan control to change whom voters hold accountable. By identifying when partisan or territorial loyalties drive attributions, the study clarifies a micro-mechanism through which multilevel governance can weaken democratic accountability.

Broader Implications

The findings underscore that the political context — who governs where — conditions perceptual biases among voters. For scholars and practitioners interested in electoral accountability, federalism, and regionalist politics, the paper highlights when and how voters 'pass the buck' in ways that can shelter national incumbents or elevate regional nationalist actors in the eyes of their constituents.