From Personal Responsibility to Political Mobilization: Using Attribution Frames to Overcome Policy Feedback Effects

• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211063215
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(2) 173–185

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211063215

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From Personal Responsibility to Political

Mobilization: Using Attribution Frames to

Overcome Policy Feedback Effects

Mallory E. SoRelle

1



Abstract

Public policies that promote personal responsibility while minimizing government responsibility are a key feature of modern

American political economy. They can decrease Americans’political participation on a given issue, with detrimental conse-

quences for the wellbeing of economically insecure families. Can this pattern be overcome? I argue that attribution frames

highlighting government’s role in and responsibility for policies may increase people’s propensity for political action on an issue,

but only if the frame can increase the salience of their preexisting beliefs about government intervention. Drawing on the case of

consumer f‌inancial protection, I administer an experiment to determine the effect of attribution framing on people’s willingness

to act in support of a popular banking reform. I f‌ind that helping people draw parallels between an issue they feel responsibility

for and one they accept government responsibility for can boost political engagement on behalf of the original policy.

Keywords

public policy, political communication, policy feedback, consumer credit, personal responsibility

When George W. Bush signed the 2005 bankruptcy reform

bill into law, a measure that made it considerably harder for

the average American to get a f‌inancial “fresh start,”the

president justif‌ied the new policy on the grounds that

“America is a nation of personal responsibility where people

are expected to meet their obligations.”His argument

probably resonated with Americans, who are inf‌luenced not

only by a deeply rooted individualist mentality (Feldman,

1988) but also by pervasive exposure to governmental pol-

icies that teach us we are rational market actors who bear

responsibility for our own f‌inancial decisions and misfortunes

(see, for example, Hacker, 2006;Soss et al., 2011). Scholars

have documented lawmakers’increasing fondness for poli-

cies that are characterized by market logic and that channel

benef‌its and protections through market structures (Hacker,

2006;Hackett, 2019;Howard, 1997;Mettler, 2011;Soss

et al., 2011). Jacob Hacker (2006) dubbed this trend

America’s“Personal Responsibility Crusade,”and Soss,

Fording, and Schram argue it is part of a broader neoliberal

project “that turns citizens into prudent market actors who

bear personal responsibility for their problems”(2011: 51).

Studies have also demonstrated that these types of policies

have political consequences. Work from scholars like Soss

(1999),Soss et al., (2011),Hacker (2006),Mettler (2011,

2018), and a bevy of others paints a vivid picture of the

demobilizing effects of policy regimes designed to promote

personal responsibility while burying government’s role in an

opaque web of private distributive mechanisms. This pattern

can weaken the political voice of ordinary Americans who,

despite rhetoric of personal responsibility, often need a

helping hand from government to solve problems that result

from structural inequality at least as much as personal de-

cision making. In the absence of wholesale policy reform, is

there a way to overcome the demobilizing effects of policies

that teach people to blame themselves for problems that

government has helped to create (or failed to help solve)? Can

people be mobilized to take political action on behalf of issues

that they have come to think of as matters of personal, rather

than government, responsibility?

In this paper I contend that the feedback effects generated

by policies at the center of the “Personal Responsibility

Crusade”create a problem of attribution—the process people

engage in to develop causal stories that inf‌luence their

preferences and behaviors (Heider, 1958)—that limits po-

litical mobilization for those issues. I turn to the growing

experimental literature on political communication to explore

one possible solution: the use of attribution frames.

1

Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, Durham, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Mallory E. SoRelle, Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, 210

Sanford, Durham, NC 27708-0245, USA.

Email: mallory.sorelle@duke.edu