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Participation in the Wake of Adversity: Blame Attribution and Policy-Oriented Evaluations

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Abstract

In this paper we investigate to what extent perceptions of economic conditions, policy-oriented evaluations, and blame attribution affected Californians’ involvement in political activities in 2010. We use a statistical methodology that allows us to study not only the behavior of the average citizen, but also the behavior of “types” of citizens with latent predispositions that incline them toward participation or abstention. The 2010 election is an excellent case study, because it was a period when citizens were still suffering the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and many were concerned about the state’s budgetary crisis. We find that individuals who blamed one of the parties for the problems with the budget process, and who held a position on the 2010 Affordable Care Act, were often considerably more likely to participate. We also find, however, that the impact of economic evaluations, positions on the health care reform, and blame attributions was contingent on citizens’ latent participation propensities and depended on the class of political activity.

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Notes

  1. For example: the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (the “financial system bailout”), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “fiscal stimulus package”), and the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the “health care bill” or “Obamacare”).

  2. See Alvarez and Sinclair (2015) for further discussion of politics and public opinion in California at this point in time, and for more details regarding the subsequent political consequences.

  3. The governor in California is in charge of preparing the budget and submitting it to both legislative chambers; the legislature is allowed to make amendments to the bill. The legislature must pass the budget by June 15 and, until the approval of Proposition 25 in November 2010, passage of the law required a super-majority vote in each chamber, empowering legislative Republicans as well. After the budget passes the legislature, the governor may sign or veto the bill—in which case a supermajority of the legislature may vote to override the veto.

  4. Governor Schwarzenegger was considered “a moderate Republican” with “liberal views on social issues” (Chandler and Kousser 2008), and often clashed with legislators of both parties.

  5. We assume that there is a single dimension of conventional political participation, and we break participants into the three classes discussed in the text. The single dimensional model makes sense for the US, as there is very little unconventional political participation—little protesting, little civil disobedience, and few instances of other types of political participation outside the typical political space. Nor does the data available here allow for the estimation and examination of a two-dimensional (e.g., conventional and unconventional participatory dimensions) model. Such a model is better suited for use in other democratic nations, where there is a much greater use of unconventional political participation, such as Argentina (Alvarez et al. 2015).

  6. We estimate our mixture model using a Bayesian approach, whereby population parameters are not treated as fixed quantities but as random variables that follow probability distributions (Jackman 2000). We use our survey data and MCMC simulation methods to learn about the characteristics of these distributions. In doing so, we assume that intercepts (α T(i)j ’s) follow mixture distributions (that is, “weighted combinations” of distributions, as described by Imai and Tingley 2012, p. 221) and model activity-specific slopes (β j ’s) using a multilevel approach by assuming that they are drawn from a common distribution with mean µ β and variance σ 2 β . The multilevel approach is appealing when making multiple comparisons, as it leads to wider bayesian posterior intervals for model coefficients and implies that there is no need for multiple comparisons corrections (Gelman et al. 2012).

  7. Thus, we use survey self-reports of political behavior, attitudes, and opinions, to test our hypotheses, building upon decades of research using survey and polling data to study political behavior. There are of course other ways to study political behavior, using other forms of observational data or experimental approaches. While those alternatives have their own merits, observational or experimental data do not allow us to easily test hypotheses that are fundamentally about how individuals perceive their economic situation, nor how who they may blame if they perceive that some political actor needs to be held accountable for how the individual perceives their economic situation.

  8. In our data analysis, we include two dummy variables quantifying attitudes toward the health care reform: one indicating support and the other one indicating opposition, with “Don’t have strong feelings about it” as the baseline category. Individuals who reported “Don’t know” or “Haven’t heard” about the bill were dropped from the analysis.

  9. Our data analysis includes one binary indicator of blame attribution for the problems with the budget process, taking value 1 if the respondent blames a single party (either the Republican or the Democratic Party) and 0 if the respondent blames both the Democratic and the Republican Party. Individuals who reported blaming neither party were dropped from the analysis.

  10. Figure A.1 in the supplementary material gives the distribution of model coefficients for each political activity. Although these plots are not useful for assessing the magnitude of covariate effects, they provide an idea of the sign and statistical significance of each covariate.

  11. The hypothetical individual has the following baseline characteristics: male, college graduate, annual household income between $60,000 and $80,000, age 40–59, White, Independent, middle of the road ideology, thinks the state's economy and personal finances will stay the same, blames both parties for the problems with the budget process, and opposes the health care bill.

  12. The non-White indicator encompasses Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and unspecified non-White races.

  13. Table A.2 in the supplementary material gives marginal effects by participatory type for all covariates included in the mixture model and for each political activity.

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Acknowledgments

Alvarez and Sinclair thank The John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation for their support of the collection of the 2010 California survey data used in this paper, and for their support of research associated with that project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Ines Levin

  2. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    J. Andrew Sinclair

  3. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    R. Michael Alvarez

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  1. Ines Levin
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Correspondence to Ines Levin.

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Levin, I., Sinclair, J. & Alvarez, R. Participation in the Wake of Adversity: Blame Attribution and Policy-Oriented Evaluations. Polit Behav 38, 203–228 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-015-9316-6

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