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Listening to the Government: How Information Shapes Responsibility Attributions

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Abstract

Assigning credit and blame in systems of multilevel government, such as federal states, requires information. This paper examines how voters respond to information about policy outcomes when attributing responsibility to multiple levels of government in a European context. Using an experimental design, we show that the responsibility attributions of British voters are affected by perceptual biases, notably their feelings about the government and the European Union (EU). But interestingly, we also find that voters, regardless of their predispositions, are only responsive to information they receive from their national government, whereas they ignore information provided by EU officials. These findings have implications not only for our understanding of attribution in systems of multiple levels of government, but also for how voters use information selectively depending on the credibility of the source.

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Notes

  1. The same applies if we describe the Union’s executive as a dual executive consisting of both the Commission and the Council. The Council plays both a legislative and an executive role in the EU and is made up by members of national governments of different partisan persuasions.

  2. Notably utilitarian cost-benefit calculations concerned with whether individuals stand to gain from market integration have been shown to influence citizens’ support for the EU (see Gabel 1998; McLaren 2006).

  3. The articles that we created were based on existing stories from national newspapers and pre-tested prior to their introduction in the lab using focus groups. The focus groups reported that they thought that the news articles were, in fact, real news stories from a legitimate source. The news stories resembled in format material from the BBC website, which is one of the most widely used online news sources in the UK.

  4. See Mintz et al. (2006) for evidence against using students and Druckman and Kam (2011) for evidence in favour of using students.

  5. Participants had an average age of 29, but included people from 18 to 72. Slightly more women (59%) than men took part in the experiment. 36% of the participants were still in education, and among those no longer in education, the majority held some type of university degree (58%), making our sample considerably more educated than the British electorate. Our participants were also more middle class than the electorate, with around half of employed people working in professional or managerial jobs.

  6. The participants were informed that they were participating in a research study about contemporary issues in politics and the media. The general instructions informed participants that they would have to complete two questionnaires and read two news articles.

  7. Conventional measures of partisanship would give us only around a quarter of the sample as government supporters; by using a 0–10 scale of government approval we are able to get a more nuanced guide to any individual’s view of the government party. It also means that we have an analogous measure to the 0–10 EU support scale.

  8. For example, if a participant was given a positive report about the economic downtown and the source was the government, then the same positive direction of information and same government source were carried over to the status of healthcare report.

  9. Note that our subsequent analysis excludes the people (eight for the EU source treatment and eight for the government source treatment) who were unable to identify whether the treatment news article they received contained positive or negative information on the economy, and in total seven people (five for the EU source treatment and two for the government source treatment) that were unable to identify whether the treatment news article they received contained positive or negative information about healthcare. This is designed to eliminate subjects who simply did not pay any attention to the articles, and uses the question ‘In your opinion, did the first article have a positive, negative, or neutral assessment of the economic situation in Britain? (Positive, Neutral, Negative, Don’t know).

  10. These questions are designed to focus on ‘functional responsibility’ (or what some social psychologists call ‘role responsibility’), which refers to the obligations that institutions or individuals are expected to fulfil. It is worth noting that we are not ‘cueing’ participants in any way by asking them to directly credit or blame anybody for good or bad conditions, but rather asking for a more ‘objective’ assessment of responsibility. This makes any estimates of perceptual bias effects more conservative.

  11. See Consolidated versions of the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, Title 1, Articles 2–6 (Official Journal C 115 of 9 May 2008).

  12. Given EU support and (Labour) government support were potentially correlated, we also ran models predicting EU attributions of responsibility which additionally included the government support variable and an interaction between this and treatment. These interactions were not statistically significant, and the results we present here were not affected.

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Acknowledgments

Financial support for this project was gratefully received from the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC Grant No. RES-062- 23-1522) and Jesus College Major Research Grants Fund. The authors would also like to thank the staff and participants at the Centre for Experimental Social Science at Nuffield College, Oxford, and Robert Johns and the three anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3UQ, UK

    Sara B. Hobolt & James Tilley

  2. Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48106-1248, USA

    Jill Wittrock

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  1. Sara B. Hobolt
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Correspondence to Sara B. Hobolt.

Appendix: News Articles Given to Participants

Appendix: News Articles Given to Participants

(Bold type indicates positive/negative frame, italic type indicates EU/government source)

Thank you for answering those questions. Next we would like you to read an article about the economic situation in Britain at the moment. Please read the report carefully.

1 June 2009

Economic downturn “less severe/more severe than feared” says the government/says the EU

The economic downturn in Britain will be less/more deep than previously forecast with unemployment staying below 8/exceeding 12 per cent, according to new government figures/new figures from the EU.

The Treasury/The European Commission has stated that Britain’s economy will shrink by less than 2/more than 4 per cent this year, a contraction that is half/double the level it estimated only 4 months ago. The government/EU said in January that it expected the British economy to shrink 3.9/2.1 per cent this year but its outlook is now much more optimistic/pessimistic. It also now expects a small increase/decrease in 2010 compared to its January forecast of a 0.4 per cent contraction/0.4 per cent growth.

Unemployment is expected to remain below 8/exceed 12 per cent by the end of next year. The government/EU has forecast that less than ½/more than 2 million jobs will be lost across Britain by the end of 2010, the government says/government admits /EU says that this means the British economy will have been one of the least/most affected in Europe by the global downturn.

Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer,/Joaquin Almunia, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, said: “The British economy is in the midst of its deepest and most widespread recession in the post-war era, but/and the measures taken in these exceptional circumstances are expected to/may not put a floor under the fall in economic activity this year and enable a recovery next year.”

Mr Darling/Mr Almunia told a press conference that many encouraging/discouraging economic signals have recently emerged, pointing to both the turbulence on financial markets and new business confidence figures. “We may no longer/still be in free-fall”, he said.

The government/the EU forecasts say “the likelihood that economic activity in 2010 will be stronger/weaker than previously envisaged” will contain any/mean a further deterioration in the public finances. The government previously announced an extra £700 billion in borrowing over the next 5 years to plug the gap in the public finances as tax receipts plunge and spending on unemployment benefits and stimulus measures rises. But the higher/lower than forecast tax take and less sharp/sharper than forecast decline in economic activity should slow/speed up the rise in the government’s debts as a share of output, the government/EU report said.

Next we would like you to read an article about health care in Britain at the moment. Please read the report carefully.

1 June 2009

UK life expectancy “among the worst/best in Europe” says/admits government/says EU as waiting lists also rise/fall

The average life expectancy of men and women in Britain ranks alongside some of the poorest/richest countries in Europe, according to new government figures/figures from the EU.

Britain comes 21st/4th out of 25 European countries in a new table of life expectancy published by the Department for Health/European Commission today. The figures place women’s longevity in Britain below/above that of all major EU countries including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The figures were described as “unacceptable”/“acceptable” by opposition politicians, who pointed out that they don’t factor in the wide variations in life expectancy within Britain. Doctors warn that people living in some parts of Glasgow can expect to live up to three decades less than those living in the Home Counties.

Although men’s life expectancies were generally shorter than women’s, they were lower/higher compared to other countries the Department of Health/European Commission reported. Norway and Denmark were named as the countries where men can expect to live the longest after the age of 50, and Denmark came top of the league table for women. At 79/86 years and 8 months the average life expectancy for women in Britain is considerably shorter/longer than the European average of 83 years and 6 months. Men fare slightly worse overall, with their average life span of 77 years and 6 months, and/although this was below/above the EU average by nearly 3 years.

This report comes less than a week after other government/EU figures showed that NHS waiting lists had risen/fallen over the last year. These government/EU statistics show the number of patients waiting to be admitted to NHS hospitals in England has risen/fallen 19.8% in the last year. Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Health,/Androulla Vassiliou, the EU Health Commissioner, said: “Waiting lists in the UK have risen/fallen significantly this year, and our prediction is for them to continue to rise/fall over the coming year”.

He/She said: “Waiting for an appointment can be worrying for patients and reducing waiting times should be a priority. Patients who need urgent treatment need to get it and those who don’t need to be informed and supported to avoid unnecessary anxiety.”

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Hobolt, S.B., Tilley, J. & Wittrock, J. Listening to the Government: How Information Shapes Responsibility Attributions. Polit Behav 35, 153–174 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-011-9183-8

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