¹ For example, Feldman, Stanley, ‘Economic Self-interest and the Vote: Evidence and Meaning’Google Scholar, and Peffley, Mark, ‘The Voter as Juror: Attributing Responsibility for Economic Outcomes’, both in Eulau, Heinz and Lewis-Beck, Michael, eds, Economic Conditions and Electoral Outcomes: The United States and Western Europe (New York: Agathon Press, 1985), pp. 144–66 and 187–206Google Scholar respectively; and Peffley, Mark and Williams, J. T., ‘Attributing Responsibility for National Economic Problems’, American Politics Quarterly, 13 (1985), 393–425.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In particular, see Tyler, Tom R., ‘Personalization in Attributing Responsibility for National Problems to the President’, Political behavior, 4 (1982), 379–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Iyengar, Shanto, ‘Television News and Citizens' Explanations of National Affairs’, American Political Science Review, 81 (1987), 815–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for evidence relating attributions of responsibility to political evaluations.

² See Thompson, Dennis F., ‘Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands’, American Political Science Review, 74 (1980), 905–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Weaver, R. Kent, ‘The Politics of Blame Avoidance’, Journal of Public Policy, 6 (1986), 371–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar for discussions of the strategies used by public officials to avoid blame.

³ Fincham, Frank D. and Jaspars, Jos M., ‘Attribution of Responsibility: From Man the Scientist to Man as Lawyer’, in Berkowitz, Lawrence, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (New York: Academic Press, 1980), Chap. 13, pp. 81–138.Google Scholar

⁴ Schlenker, Barry, Impression Management (Monterey, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, 1980), p. 136.Google Scholar

⁵ See generally Austin, John L., ‘A Plea for Excuses’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57 (1956), 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greenawalt, Kent, ‘The Perplexing Borders of Justification and Excuse’, Columbia Law Review, 84 (1984), 1897–927CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Scott, M. B. and Lyman, S. M., ‘Accounts’, American Sociological Review, 33 (1968), 46–62CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, for discussions of excuses and justifications.

⁶ Austin, , ‘A Plea for Excuses’Google Scholar; Scott, and Lyman, , ‘Accounts’Google Scholar; Tedeschi, James T. and Reis, Harry, ‘Predicaments and Verbal Tactics of Impression Management’, in Antaki, C., ed., Ordinary Language Explanations of Social behavior (London: Academic Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Darley, John and Zanna, Mark, ‘Making Moral Judgments’, American Scientist, 70 (1982), 515–21Google ScholarPubMed; Shaver, Kelly G., The Attribution of Blame: Causality, Responsibility, and Blameworthiness (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tetlock, Philip E., ‘Toward an Intuitive Politician Model of Attribution Processes’, in Schlenker, Barry R., ed., The Self and Social Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), pp. 203–34.Google Scholar

⁷ This political account typology bears some similarity to one provided by Bies, Robert J., ‘The Predicament of Injustice: The Management of Moral Outrage’Google Scholar, in Staws, Barry M. and Cummings, L. L., eds, Research in Organizational behavior, 9 (1987), 289–319.Google Scholar I do not claim that Table 1 represents the entire universe of political accounts. Rather, they were chose because they seem to be fairly representative of the responses officials make in political predicaments and because they are clearly distinguishable along the excuse/justification dimension.

⁸ Harvey, John H., ‘Attribution of Freedom’, in Harvey, John H., Ickes, William J. and Kidd, Robert F., eds, New Directions in Attribution Research (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1976), pp. 87–124Google Scholar; Steiner, Ivan D., ‘Perceived Freedom’, in Berkowitz, Leonard, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (New York: Academic Press, 1970).Google Scholar

⁹ Heider, Fritz, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: Wiley, 1956).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Kahneman, Daniel and Tversky, Amos, ‘The Psychology of Preferences’, Scientific American, 246 (1982), 136–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kahneman, Daniel and Tversky, Amos, ‘Choice, Value, and Frames’, American Psychologist, 39 (1984), 341–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ Among the materials included in the questionnaire packet for purposes other than the study reported here were the ten-item economic individualism scale (Feldman, ‘Economic Self-interest and the Vote: Evidence and Meaning’) and six questions assessing causal attributions for racial inequality. It is noteworthy that exploratory analyses did not reveal any significant variation in reactions to the twelve accounts due to differences on these scales or due to the mainstay demographic variables of sex, ideology or partisanship.

¹² Although the assemblyman received more negative ratings than those given to ‘average’ politicians, which are consistently positive (greater than the midpoint of 50), the data do reflect the existence of the ‘person-positivity bias’, Sears, David O., ‘The Person-Positivity Bias’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44 (1983), 233–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although no information other than his vote for the budget bill was provided, feelings towards the assemblyman were still substantially more positive than feelings towards the policy itself.

¹³ Having each subject react to more than one account ‘as if they were independent’ is admittedly a less than ideal research design option. This strategy was used in order to maximize the number of subjects responding to each account. In order to minimize systematic order biases the order in which the three accounts were encountered was varied within each subset. More important, the basic results reported below have been replicated and extended within the context of a more appropriate between-subjects design, where each subject reacted to only one account, and are available from the author.

¹⁴ See generally Hodges, Bertram H., ‘Effects of Valence on Relative Weighting in Impression Formation’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30 (1974), 378–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kanouse, David E. and Hanson, L. R. Jr, ‘Negativity in Evaluations’, in Jones, Edward E. et al. , eds, Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of behavior (Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1971), pp. 132–47Google Scholar; and Lau, Richard R., ‘Two Explanations for Negativity Effects in Political behavior’, American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 119–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵ Note that the effectiveness of both past and future outcome accounts parallels Morris Fiorina's conclusion (in Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar) that both retrospective assessments of past economic policies and prospective expectations about future performance play an important role in voting.

¹⁶ Hamilton, V. Lee, ‘Chains of Command: Responsibility Attribution in Hierarchies’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 16 (1986), 113–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ Thompson, , ‘Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands’.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Weaver, , ‘The Politics of Blame Avoidance’.Google Scholar

¹⁹ See Gamson, William A., ‘Political Trust and its Ramifications’ in Abcarian, Gilbert and Soule, John W., eds, Social Psychology and Political behavior (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1971), pp. 41–58.Google Scholar

²⁰ See Thompson, , ‘Moral Responsibility of Public Officials’Google Scholar, and Weaver, , ‘The Politics of Blame Avoidance’Google Scholar, for insightful discussion of some of these issues.

²¹ Austin, John L., Philosophical Papers, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 177.Google Scholar

²² For discussions of the credit-claiming motive of politicians, see Mayhew, David, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Fiorina, Morris P., Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press)Google Scholar; Fenno, Richard, Home Style: House Members in their Districts (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1978)Google Scholar; and Weaver, R. Kent, Automatic Government: The Politics of Indexation (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1988).Google Scholar