When government action—or inaction—contributes to a crisis, public evaluations of elected executives become vulnerable. Because responsibility is often ambiguous, executives can use presentational strategies—frames that describe their role in managing the problem—to shape citizen judgments.

🧪 What was compared

• Two common presentational strategies were examined:
• Blame claiming: the executive accepts responsibility for the problem and response.
• Blame deflecting: the executive shifts responsibility onto other actors or institutions.

📊 How the study tested this

• Survey experiments were used to assess causal effects on public support.
• Stimuli included both stylized scenarios and real-world crisis examples to test robustness across contexts.

🔑 Key findings

• Blame claiming is more effective than blame deflecting at preserving or improving public support for elected executives after crises.
• The effectiveness of blame claiming operates through improved perceptions of the executive’s leadership valence—that is, citizens view the leader more favorably when responsibility is accepted.
• These patterns hold across the different experimental stimuli (stylized and real-world), indicating consistent effects of presentational strategy.

🤔 Why it matters

• While executives are generally better off avoiding crises altogether, when crises occur, “stopping the buck” by accepting responsibility is a superior political strategy to attempting to deflect blame. This finding has direct implications for political communication, accountability, and the study of attribution in democratic politics.