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.
đź“Š 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.
