Microambiente “Ok Tendencias”.

the Attribution Process

3.1

Introduction

Holding politicians to account for their decisions through voting is a keystone of democracy. By punishing or rewarding elected politicians at ballot boxes, voters hold politicians accountable for policies that expect should meet their needs (Key, 1966; Ferejohn, 1986). Firmly embedded in electoral politics is the expectation that eco- nomic performance especially affects voters’ evaluation of politicians’ performance and, thus, their voting decisions (e.g., Tufte, 1978; Fiorina, 1981; Erikson, 1989; Erik- son, MacKuen, and Stimson, 2002; Ansolabehere, Meredith, and Snowberg, 2014; Healy and Lenz, 2017). A burgeoning research explores the effects of partisan bias on evaluations of economic conditions (e.g., Conover, Feldman, and Knight, 1986; Bar- tels, 2002; Evans and Andersen, 2006; Taber and Lodge, 2006; Lyons and Jaeger, 2014) and investigates whether and how information mitigate such biases (e.g., Hobolt,

Tilley, and Wittrock, 2013; Malhotra and Kuo, 2008).

Despite the richness of the economic voting literature, research on whether and how partisan policy orientation affects voters’ evaluations of economic events is still in its infancy. Compared to other economic measures, such as employment and income, economic events, which are highly visible and frequently are highlighted by the media, often serve as channels of information that voters evaluate to judge the economic performance of political actors. Consequently, understanding how voters attribute responsibility for economic events is of paramount importance.

In the attribution process in the wake of economic events, voters believe that policy choices drive the events, and they attribute certain policy choices to one party or the other. No economic event is random. The policy choices that political actors make precipitate, intentionally or not, economic events. In a complex policy environment, voters regard the party label of a policymaker as the most influential information shortcut from which to infer the policymaker’s position on an issue (e.g., Popkin, 1994; Rahn, 1993). Inferring policy choices from a policymaker’s party label (i.e., party affiliation), voters evaluate whether and how much that policymaker is responsible for a given event. Yet as suggested by well-known cognitive traits of loss aversion (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) and negativity bias (e.g., Lau, 1985), the effects of party label become potent only when the event has negative consequences. When negative events occur, voters are incentivized to be better informed about which policy could affect the occurrence of the event and, thus, facilitate them to match it with the incumbents’ party policy platform to assign responsibility because they wish to mitigate the chance that similar losses will occur in the future. In contrast, in the case of positive events, voters have relatively fewer incentives to indulge in costly

information gathering, and, thus, the degree to which partisan cues serve as proxies for policy drivers shrinks.

In this chapter, to explore the asymmetric effects of incumbents’ partisanship, I focus on the case of corporate headquarters (HQ) relocation as a salient local economic event. Corporate HQ relocation provides a unique opportunity to study the effects of the party label on economic events. Because the main drivers of corporate HQ relocation are corporate tax and business policies, the distinct positions that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party take with regards to these policies allows us to estimate partisan effects. More importantly, the clarity of the different effects of HQ inflow and outflow helps analysts sidestep the major challenge in estimating the positive-negative asymmetry: positive impacts occur when a HQ moves into an area, and negative effects occur when a HQ relocates out.

This chapter reports results from an experimental randomized survey of U.S. adults. The survey, formatted as a mock new story, manipulated HQ inflow and HQ outflow and the governor’s party affiliation (Republican Party or Democratic Party). The main finding is that the partisanship of governors exerts a systematic in- fluence on individuals’ attribution process only in the case of HQ outflow (a negative event): respondents more unfavorably evaluate the governor’s economic competence and support his or her re-election bid when the governor is a Democrat than when he or she is a Republican when HQ ouflow condition is assigned. In the case of an HQ in- flow, party label effects appear muted. Hence, the results reveal that the effects of an incumbents’ partisanship are heterogeneous with the respondents’ own partisanship and material interests: the effects are found mostly for Republicans, independents, and those who belong to the potential corporate HQ workforce.

These findings have important implications for the study of partisanship and the role of policy information. While a number of recent studies have examined the role of information as a mediator of partisan bias (e.g., Hobolt, Tilley, and Wittrock, 2013; Lyons and Jaeger, 2014; Malhotra and Kuo, 2008), possible interactions between policy information and the party labels of political actors has been understudied. Given that in a complex policy environment voters regard party labels as reliable proxies for the policy positions of political actors (e.g., Bullock, 2011; Popkin, 1994), policy information often does not affect the attribution process in isolation; instead, it interacts with perceived partisan policy preferences. In fact, voters consider the correlation between the incumbent’s policy preference (inferred from her partisanship) and information about why the event occurred. Then, using the perceived correlation, they can estimate how likely it is that the incumbent’s policy affected the outcome, and they assign responsibility to the incumbent accordingly. The findings also suggest that when there is a perceived positive relationship between party policy orientation and policy-relevant facts, partisan effects will be magnified rather than be lessened.

Furthermore, this research breaks new ground in research on the effects of par- tisanship in economic voting by emphasizing the positive-negative asymmetry. A number of recent studies suggest that partisan bias weakens when the evidence shows unambiguously that real economic conditions, such as an economic crisis, are bad (e.g., Chzhen, Evans, and Pickup, 2014; Parker-Stephen, 2013; Redlawsk, Civettini, and Emmerson, 2010; Stanig, 2013). My analysis shows a different possibility: par- tisan effects take place only in the context of blame assignment, when the negative consequences of an event motivate voters to engage in cognitive steps that link policy information and partisan policy preference. The findings indicate, in other words,

that analysts should pay more to the distinct political reactions that occur under negative and positive conditions.

3.2

Economic Events and Asymmetric Effects of