Decreasing the Economy’s Impact on Evaluations of the President: An Experiment on Attribution Framing

In December 2007, the United States entered the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. (1) As the economy contracted, unemployment rose from 4.7% in late 2007 to 7.8% by January, 2009. That same month, Barack Obama was inaugurated. Two years later, the economy was officially out of recession, but fears of a "double dip" recession remained, and unemployment had climbed to almost 10%. In December 2010, 81% of the public thought national economic conditions were "very bad" or "fairly bad" while a mere 0.2% thought conditions were "very good." (2) Most agreed that things were bad, but how much did these perceptions of the economy shape public evaluations of Obama? Research on public evaluations of the president has consistently found that economic considerations are a primary driver of these evaluations (e.g., Brace and Hinckley 1991; Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002; Kernell 1978; McAvoy 2006; Mueller 1973; Newman 2002; Ostrom and Simon 1985). However, research has also shown that events, news coverage, and elite discourse can increase the weight of various considerations on evaluations via a process known as priming or framing (e.g., Druckman and Holmes 2004; Edwards, Mitchell, and Welch 1995; Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Kelleher and Wolak 2006; Krosnick and Brannon 1993; Krosnick and Kinder 1990; Miller and Krosnick 2000). In particular, this line of research shows that when news stories, dramatic events, or elite rhetoric focus on a particular topic, like the economy or terrorism, individuals tend to weigh considerations relating to that topic more heavily in their evaluations of the president. However, few studies explore the possibility that the same kind of messages could decrease the weight of a consideration on an evaluation. Of course, presidents often have incentives to try to decrease the weight of unfavorable considerations in public evaluations (Jacobs and Shapiro 1994). The Obama administration worked diligently to convince the public that it inherited the faltering economy, implying that the state of the economy should not be the primary basis of evaluating Obama (e.g., Wilson 2009). Do such attempts to attribute blame somewhere other than the White House alter the criteria by which the public evaluates presidents? The results of a survey experiment described below show that an attribution flame decreased the weight of economic considerations on evaluations of President Obama. The results highlight a politically and theoretically significant type of framing effect that has not received much attention. The findings are important because economic considerations consistently have a powerful effect on evaluations of the president (see Gronke and Newman 2009). If a message can dampen the strong connection between economic considerations and presidential evaluations, similar messages may prove powerful in other contexts where connections are not as strong. Furthermore, the effects reported here appear to have arisen primarily by the frame's capacity to increase a consideration's perceived applicability, not by simply raising considerations' accessibility in memory. The article proceeds by discussing framing's impact on presidential evaluations. This discussion generates a hypothesis that is tested via the survey experiment. After describing the experiment and the results, I discuss what the results tell us about the psychology of framing effects. I close by examining the article's implications for the presidential accountability and presidential success in Congress. Framing, Attribution Frames, and Evaluations of Presidents Most accounts of individuals' political attitudes, including evaluations of presidents (which I will call "presidential evaluations"), view attitudes toward an object as a weighted sum of a collection of considerations (e.g., Azjen and Fishbein 1980; Chong and Druckman 2007a). As noted above, studies of framing and priming demonstrate that by emphasizing a certain consideration, various stimuli (e. …