Framing Responsibility for Political Issues

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Volumn 546, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 59-70

  Iyengar, Shanto ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007326158     PISSN: 00027162     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0002716296546001006     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. The psychological evidence is reviewed in David J. Schneider, Albert H. Hastorf, and Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Person Perception (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979); Phillip Brickman et al., “Models of Helping and Coping,” American Psychologist, vol. 37 (1982); James R. Bettman and Barton A. Weitz, “Attributions in the Board Room: Causal Reasoning in Corporate Annual Reports,” Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 28 (1983); James Lemkau, F. B. Bryant, and Phillip Brickman, “Client Commitment in the Helping Relationship,” in Basic Processes in Helping Relationships, ed. T. A. Mills (New York: Aldine, 1982); Valerie S. Folkes, “Consumer Reactions to Product Failure: An Attributional Analysis,” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 10 (1984).
2. Alan I. Abramowitz, David Lanoue, and Subha Ramesh, “Economic Conditions, Causal Attributions, and Political Evaluations in the 1984 Presidential Election,” Journal of Politics, vol. 50 (1988); Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
3. Morris P. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); Douglas A. Hibbs, The American Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Stephen Ansolabehere, Shanto Iyengar, and Adam Simon, “Good News, Bad News, and Economic Voting” (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 1990); Donald R. Kinder and Roderick Kiewiet, “Economic Discontent and Political Behavior,” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 23 (1979).
4. Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate (New York: Free Press, 1995).
5. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Choices, Values, and Frames,” American Psychologist, vol. 39 (1984); Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions,” in Rational Choice: The Contrast Between Economics and Psychology, ed. Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); George A. Quattrone and Amos Tversky, “Contrasting Rational and Psychological Analyses of Political Choice,” American Political Science Review, vol. 82 (1988); Richard Thaler, “The Psychology and Economics Conference Handbook,” in Rational Choice: The Contrast Between Economics and Psychology, ed. Einhorn and Hogarth.
6. Tom Smith, “That Which We Call Welfare by Any Other Name Would Smell Sweeter: An Analysis of the Impact of Question Wording on Response Patterns,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 51 (1987); Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording, and Context (New York: Academic Press, 1982).
7. Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? chap. 3.
8. The nine separate experiments were administered between June 1985 and September 1987. The number of individuals who participated in each experiment ranged from 40 to 244. While the participants constituted a reasonable approximation of Suffolk County, New York, they were, in comparison with the American electorate, more affluent, more Catholic and more Jewish, more educated, and more likely to have voted in the last election. For further details on the sample participants, see Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? chap. 3.
9. The experimental procedures adhered fully to the American Psychological Association's guidelines on the conduct of experimental research.
10. Crime elicited the largest number of causal and treatment attributions-2.7 and 2.1, respectively-presumably because of its relatively obtrusive nature.
11. The distinctiveness of unemployment may stem from the unusually high level of prominence accorded the issue during the period of this research. Thus people may have regarded unemployment as a particular instance of national economic problems.
12. Each respondent's percentage of individualistic attributions was subtracted from the percentage of societal attributions to arrive at a net responsibility score.
13. Robert E. Lane, Political Ideology: Why the Common Man Believes What He Does (New York: Free Press, 1962); Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David Apter (New York: Free Press, 1964).
14. For experimental evidence that demonstrates this connection, see Franklin Gilliam, Shanto Iyengar, and Adam Simon, “The Intersection of Race, Crime and Television News” (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Political Science Association, Chicago, 1995).