Why Some Blame Politics for Their Personal Problems

• Date: 01 September 2021
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211013463
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211013463

American Politics Research

2021, Vol. 49(5) 478 –489

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211013463

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Article

“A 30 rack of coors light is $23 now at Sun Stop. Thanks,

Obama.” @CampaignRPoz, September 21, 2014.

When things go wrong in our lives, it is natural to try to

determine who or what is to blame. Some blame karma or

bad luck, while some find fault within themselves or others.

Interestingly, some hold the government responsible when

things in their personal lives do not turn out as they had

hoped. Why do some people believe that the political sys-

tem is to blame for the problems in their lives? We explore

the origins of people’s personal grievances with govern-

ment, focusing on individual level differences in why peo-

ple attribute negative personal outcomes to the nature of

the political system.

For the most part, people’s political judgments have been

thought to be separate from what is happening in their

personal lives. People evaluate the performance of elected

officials based on the health of the national economy, not

the state of their personal finances (Fiorina, 1981; Kinder &

Kiewiet, 1979). Demand for government investment in

redistributive policy have more to do with people’s ideology

and values than their personal socioeconomic status (Fong,

2001; Schlozman & Verba, 1979). Symbolic considerations,

such as core values, partisanship, and ideology, typically do

a better job explaining political preferences than self-inter-

ested personal concerns (Sears & Funk, 1991; Sears et al.,

1980). Yet even if most people’s political preferences are not

driven by self-interested concerns, we show that there are

meaningful variations in the degree to which people see their

personal lives as intertwined with politics.

We explore why some people see their personal chal-

lenges as a product of the political system. Rather than

reflecting merely people’s material hardships, we propose

that personality traits also help explain how people assign

blame when things go wrong in their lives. We focus on

how people’s self-evaluations shape how they assign blame,

particularly the effects of personality differences in locus of

control and self-esteem. Drawing on responses to a module

of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we

show that those who feel less control over their own futures

and those who hold negative self-perceptions are more

likely to blame the political system for their personal cir-

cumstances. Political socialization serves as a counter-

vailing force, where factors like education and support for

democratic principles predict lower likelihoods of assign-

ing blame to government. The personal challenges people

face seem to play only a minor role in explaining people’s

tendency to blame government for their problems. We fur-

ther demonstrate that people’s beliefs about the political

origins of their personal problems are consequential for

how they evaluate elected officials. Those who believe that

their personal challenges have political origins are more

likely to weigh self-interested considerations in their evalu-

ations of officeholders and less likely to lean on sociotropic

1013463APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211013463American Politics ResearchBaird and Wolak

research-article2021

1University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jennifer Wolak, Department of Political Science, University of Colorado,

333 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0333, USA.

Email: wolakj@colorado.edu

Why Some Blame Politics for

Their Personal Problems

Vanessa Baird1 and Jennifer Wolak1

Abstract

Why do some people blame the political system for the problems in their lives? We explore the origins of these grievances

and how people assign responsibility and blame for the challenges they face. We propose that individual differences in the

personality traits of locus of control and self-esteem help explain why some blame the political system for their personal

problems. Using responses from a module of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we show that those

with low self-esteem and a weaker sense of control over their fates are more likely to blame the political system for the

challenges they face in their lives. We also demonstrate that this assignment of blame is politically consequential, where those

who intertwine the personal and the political are more likely to evaluate elected officials based on pocketbook economic

conditions rather than sociotropic considerations.

Keywords

self-esteem, locus of control, personality, attribution of blame