ORIGINAL PAPER
Listening to the Government: How Information Shapes
Responsibility Attributions
Sara B. Hobolt
•
James Tilley
•
Jill Wittrock
Published online: 17 November 2011
Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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 gov-
ernment, but also for how voters use information selectively depending on the
credibility of the source.
Keywords Attribution Á Information Á Laboratory experiment Á Partisanship Á
Responsibility Á European Union
S. B. Hobolt (&) Á J. Tilley
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK
e-mail: sara.hobolt@politics.ox.ac.uk
J. Tilley
e-mail: james.tilley@politics.ox.ac.uk
J. Wittrock
Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
MI 48106-1248, USA
e-mail: jillwitt@isr.umich.edu
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Polit Behav (2013) 35:153–174
DOI 10.1007/s11109-011-9183-8
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