Where Does the Buck Stop? Applying Attribution Theory to Examine Public Appraisals of the President

Modern presidents have increasingly taken on a public leadership role in the political arena. Through wars, economic crises, and increased civic demands, presidents have sought more involvement and influence in overseeing public affairs (Edwards 1983), a development accompanied by an exponential growth and institutionalization of the executive branch (Burke 2000; Hart 1995). Amid such developments, the media has focused on the president as the most salient political actor (Farnsworth and Lichter 2006; see also Brody 1991), while public polling surveys have consistently connected the president's job performance with conditions in the foreign and domestic policy domains (see Edwards 1990). Subsequently, the public has developed growing expectations for presidents to be responsive to their needs (Cohen 1995, 1999). In the course of such systemic and institutional changes, presidents have, particularly during election campaigns, reinforced and embellished the perception that they have the means to solve the nation's problems. However, presidents consistently fall short of keeping their promises to the public, revealing a gap between public expectations of the president and the president's capacity for governing (see Cronin 1977). In the midst of this paradox, scholars have become interested in understanding the dynamics that influence whether and how the public attributes responsibility to presidents for the state of national affairs and, in turn, the extent to which presidents are able to claim credit in times of success and avoid blame in times of deteriorating national conditions. Studies on attribution theory in political science have traditionally focused on the domestic policy domain, particularly on how the public attributes responsibility to the president for the state of the economy. By comparison, attribution research in the area of foreign policy has been scarce, and no work we know of has considered the domestic and foreign policy domains in tandem, nor examined how the public attributes responsibility and credit/blame for foreign policy issues to political figures, particularly the president. To fill this gap in the literature, this study employs an experimental approach to test the influence that policy domain, policy condition, and party compatibility have on public appraisals of the president. Our findings provide a new contribution to the literature on political attributions, executive accountability, and public perceptions of presidential performance. Attribution Theory in the Study of Politics Heider's (1958) early work in social psychology on the process of causal attribution served as a springboard for studying how people draw inferences from their own behavior and the behavior of others (see Heradstveit 1979; Jervis 1976; Larson 1985). Weiner (1986) later developed a model associating causal attributions with judgments of personal controllability, affective reactions, and behavior (see also Weiner 1991, 1995). In another seminal piece, Jones and Nisbett (1972) posited that actors tend to attribute their actions to situational requirements, whereas observers tend to attribute the same actions to personal dispositions, a pervasive tendency in social attribution commonly referred to as the "actor-observer hypothesis." Ross (1977) later coined the term "fundamental attribution hypothesis" to denote the propensity for people to explain the behavior of others mainly by considering dispositional, personality-based factors. These works have provided a foundation for political scientists to explore systematically public perceptions of responsibility and accountability for political figures as well as perceptions about political events, issues, and other related phenomena. As Gomez and Wilson (2003, 273) note, "Attribution is indisputably fundamental to individual decision making, and has been shown to influence powerfully attitudes toward the self and others, as well as emotional arousal" (see also Fiske and Taylor 1991 ; Hewstone 1989; Petty and Cacioppo 1996). …