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

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 consequences 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 policies 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 policies 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 decision 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 political mobilization for those issues. I turn to the growing experimental literature on political communication to explore one possible solution: the use of attribution frames. Specifically, I propose that exposing people to attribution frames that effectively prime government’s role in and responsibility for an issue may help to increase the salience of that causal story (Stone, 1989), while decreasing the relative weight people give to the personal responsibility narrative. This should, in turn, increase the likelihood that a person will consider political action as an appropriate response to problems with the given issue.

Drawing on the case of consumer financial protection—an especially salient example of a policy regime that promotes personal responsibility while hiding government’s substantial regulatory role—I administer a survey experiment to determine the causal effect of attribution frames on people’s willingness to take political action to support a popular financial reform. One set of treatments expose participants to different competitive attribution frames that remind them of government’s responsibility for protecting consumers’ finances. A second pair of treatments offers a more complex, and potentially more compelling, set of attribution frames: they present two similarity scenarios that compare consumer financial regulation to other issues that participants may already view as appropriate arenas for government intervention. I find that drawing parallels between consumer financial regulation and more traditional, and visible, policy programs designed to protect the financial security of Americans makes people most willing to accept the government attribution frame and produces the most powerful mobilizing effect on participants. While this strategy does not offer a silver bullet to reverse the demobilizing trends of the personal responsibility crusade, it offers a template that advocacy groups could emulate to subvert the broad demobilizing pressure of neoliberal policies like consumer financial protection.

Policy Feedback, Problem Attribution, and Political Inaction

Douglas Arnold (1990) argues that the electorate must be able to link policymaking to a governmental actor in order to engage politically on that issue. His assessment is an example of attribution theory: the idea that people develop beliefs about cause and effect relationships (Heider, 1958) and that those beliefs ultimately have the potential to shape their preferences across a range of issues including many political contexts (Sahar, 2014). But attributions of responsibility do not simply influence preferences. They are also powerful predictors, as Arnold alludes to, of behavior (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Ajzen, 1991).

The development of attributions can be influenced by many factors, but I contend that one of the most notable is a person’s experience with public policies. Once enacted, public policies, particularly those that become durable features of the political landscape, have the capacity to shape future politics in a variety of ways (Hall, 1986; Lowi, 1972; Mettler & SoRelle, 2017; Steinmo et al., 1992; Skocpol, 1992). Among those effects is the ability to influence attributions. Public policies have been demonstrated to transmit norms about the relationship between citizens and the state for a particular set of issues, suggesting to beneficiaries what the appropriate level of government intervention is for that problem (Hacker, 1998; Mettler, 2011). Similarly, the method of policy implementation can further influence how policy recipients view the state. If a policy intentionally obscures government’s role in a particular area, the policy generates different norms from one that provides clear evidence of government activity (Howard, 1997; Mettler, 2011). Taken together, these lessons can have powerful effects on people’s assumptions about the appropriateness of government intervention in certain policy areas. In short, policy experiences shape people’s attributions of responsibility for that issue.¹

One of the most significant trends with respect to U.S. policymaking since the 1970s has been a turn towards enacting public policies designed to make the provision of many public goods and the protection of American finances subject to market logic and market institutions (Hacker, 2006; Mettler, 2011; Soss et al., 2011; SoRelle 2020). Privatization, and the ensuing market logic that treats beneficiaries as consumers, attenuates the link between the state and its denizens (Hackett, 2019) and places the burden of maintaining financial security squarely on the shoulders of American families. Soss, Fording, and Schram clearly depict the consequences of this trajectory:

“As the state is privatized, so too are the social problems of the citizenry. Matters of shared consequence, once addressed through public decisions about how to organize collective life, are recast as personal problems to be solved through rational individual choices. ... The default assumption is that the problems of the person are products of individual choice best resolved through individual efforts to seek solutions.” (2011: 22–23)

I argue that experiences with policies like these shape ordinary American’s attributions for political problems, placing the onus of responsibility for a range of issues on individuals rather than the state, thus encouraging people to act (if they act at all) within the market itself in response to problems they encounter with privatized policy regimes. The consequences of this trend are severe: neglecting politics as an appropriate venue to boost the circumstances of ordinary Americans removes one of their most viable pathways toward economic security and social mobility.

Attribution Framing as a Solution

While scholars have diagnosed the participatory problem, the remedies are less clear. This paper proposes that—in the absence of a dramatic shift away from policymaking that promotes personal responsibility—reweighting people’s attributions through framing might offer an intermediate fix. Framing occurs when an actor highlights a particular subset of considerations that lead a person to emphasize those specific considerations over others when constructing and reporting a policy preference (Chong & Druckman 2007; Druckman 2004; Entman, 1993; Gamson & Andre, 1989; Nelson et al., 1997). A preference is “a comparative evaluation of a set of objects” that is “stored in memory and drawn on when people make decisions” (Druckman & Lupia, 2000: 2).

The growing consensus among political scientists is that very few individuals have discrete unambiguous preferences on policy issues (Converse, 1964; Tourangeau et al., 2000; Zaller & Feldman, 1992). Instead, political scientists suggest that most people hold simultaneously a number of conflicting considerations about a political issue², and their expressed preferences will typically reflect whichever considerations are most salient at a particular moment (Zaller & Feldman, 1992; Zaller 1992).

In this model of preference formation, accessibility—“the likelihood that a given consideration (or construct) will be retrieved from memory when forming a preference” ((Druckman & Lupia, 2000): 1)—is a key determinant of which opinion a person ultimately reports with respect to a particular political issue. The weight of a consideration is also important, with more strongly held considerations being more salient, and thus more likely to influence preference formation. Scholars have demonstrated that considerations—including those that shape attributions—can be influenced by elite cues, partisan heuristics, and political actors’ attempts to frame issues in certain ways (Lupia & McCubbins, 1998; Mutz, 1998; Nelson et al., 1997; Sniderman & Theriault, 2004; Zaller, 1992).

Public policies embody all of these modes of influence, so it follows that policy experience is one way that certain considerations acquire both salience and weight. When policies are submerged (Mettler, 2011) or make strategic use of attenuating rhetoric and attenuated design that intentionally obscure the relationship between the state and the policy response (Hackett, 2019), beneficiaries may struggle to properly attribute policy outcomes or issues to political actors. Simultaneously, when policy designs and delivery mechanisms highlight personal responsibility, beneficiaries may develop attributions that reflect personal responsibility narratives.

But this model of preference formation leaves open the possibility that competing frames can re-weight existing considerations, at least temporarily shifting people’s preferences and actions. This paper proposes, therefore, that exposing people to attribution frames—frames that assign responsibility for a particular issue to a specific actor—might influence the weight people accord to considerations about whether government is responsible for an issue. This, in turn, should make that person more willing to consider taking action that corresponds with the newly salient attribution. There are, of course, reasons to be cautious about this proposition. Scholars have demonstrated that attitudes do not always correspond to behavior (Fazio, 2007). Changing the salience of a person’s attributions, therefore, may not be sufficient to influence their actual behavior.

Keeping that warning in mind, however, scholars have had success using attribution frames to encourage citizen action. Reversing the government-personal responsibility nexus, for example, Bolsen (2013) and Bolsen et al., (2014) find that personalizing attribution frames work to encourage individuals to take private action to promote energy consumption when they might otherwise view conservation as a governmental mandate. Their work is designed to convince individuals of their own ability to contribute toward a public good, and they find that attribution frames promoting personal responsibility for energy decisions assist with that. In this paper, I hypothesize the reverse:

Hypothesis 1

An individual will be more willing to engage in political action when exposed to a frame that emphasizes government’s responsibility for the relevant issue.

One of the most consistent findings with respect to the connection between preferences and action is that the likelihood of an attitude translating to a behavior is increased with the strength of the attitude (Krosnick & Petty, 1995; Visser et al., 2003, 2006). This suggests that simply telling someone that government is responsible for a problem when that person has learned from their own cumulative policy experience that it is an issue of personal responsibility may not be sufficient to induce political participation. It is hard to imagine that such an attribution frame, particularly when presented in a competitive information environment, will hold up. So, I explore an alternative form of attribution framing as well: a similarity scenario that compares the issue in question to a policy that people already believe government is responsible for legislating. This method of attribution framing should work by increasing the salience and weight of people’s existing considerations instead of attempting to create a new consideration, subsequently producing a more robust effect. Thus, I further hypothesize:

Hypothesis 2

An individual will be more willing to engage in political action when exposed to a frame that employs a similarity scenario that emphasizes government’s responsibility for the relevant issue by comparing it to an issue for which government intervention is widely accepted.

Data and Methods

I test these hypotheses using the case of consumer financial protection. Financial regulation is one of the most significant and expansive neoliberal policy regimes to affect American families today. Consumer financing—from bank accounts to credit cards—has become a fundamental form of economic support for millions of Americans (Krippner, 2011). But the credit responsible for keeping American families afloat is being lent under increasingly costly, complex, and often deceptive, terms that can trap borrowers in a cycle of debt from which they struggle to escape (e.g., Hyman, 2011). Moreover, the consumer financial protections that borrowers are exposed to are characterized by heavy reliance on information disclosure, which puts the onus on borrowers to protect themselves instead of requiring business to eliminate predatory products, and those regulations are delivered through private financial transactions (redacted). As such, consumer financial protections embody both the privatizing and personalizing elements of policy design and implementation that are central to the growth of market logic and mechanisms at the heart of the neoliberal turn in U.S. policymaking. This increased borrowing under increasingly risky terms creates real consequences for American families, yet borrowers have largely avoided political avenues to address their growing dissatisfaction with finance despite government’s overwhelming role in the creation and regulation of the financial industry (McCarty et al., 2013; Kirsch & Mayer, 2013; SoRelle 2020).

This paper employs original experimental data to test the proposed hypotheses about the potential for attribution frames to overcome people’s aversion to political engagement for the case of consumer financial protection. The data was collected through an online survey experiment³ administered to a national sample of 1516 adult respondents from June 16–23, 2017.⁴ Survey experiments are advantageous because they permit the careful exposure to specific, randomly assigned treatment effects, allowing for causal inferences to be made from the results (Chong and Druckman, 2007; Iyengar, 1990). In addition to standard political and demographic questions, participants were also asked to report what, if any, types of financial products and services they had used or made payments toward in the past year.⁵ Almost all respondents reported using at least one financial product or service in the past year, highlighting the importance of credit to the financial livelihoods of the average American. The most common financial service used by respondents (79%) was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a checking account, making it the focus of the analysis in this paper.

In order to confirm that participants do, as this paper contends, view consumer financial protection as an issue of personal responsibility embedded within market transactions, the survey also presented a series of questions asking people to identify the degree to which different government and market actors should be blamed for the “problems people experience with financial products and services like bank accounts, credit cards, and loans.” The scores presented in Figure 1 reflect the average (mean) blame participants assigned to each actor on a scale from one to five, where one equals no blame and five equals all of the blame. Notably, people placed the greatest blame for problems with financial products and services on “consumers” and “banks and lenders” equally, assigning a moderate amount to a lot of blame on these actors. By contrast, government actors were deemed less culpable.

Figure 1.

Blame for problems with consumer credit.

These responses provide support for the notion that borrowers are focused on the market, not the government, as the responsible party for financial grievances (Figure 1). This blame gap—the extent to which people assign more blame to market actors than political actors—is not driven by a small group of respondents who are unusually likely to point the finger at financial institutions or borrowers. More than half of all participants (53%) assigned more blame to market actors, while only about a quarter (27%) gave more blame to government actors. Similarly, when asked how much they agreed with different statements about “the problems people have with things like credit cards, bank accounts, and loans,” 78% of participants agreed that “people should be more responsible when they use financial products like credit cards and loans” while only 58% agreed that “government should regulate the financial industry more to protect consumers”—a 20 percentage point difference.

Notably, the tendency to place more blame on consumers and financial institutions relative to public figures is greatest for those who report using conventional financial products. Across all three types of credit, participants who used a specific financial product placed about 20 percent more blame on market actors relative to political actors than people who did not use the type of credit.⁶ These results indicate that Americans—especially those who utilize financial products and services that are subject to federal consumer financial protections and are thus exposed to the public policies regulating their procurement and use—embrace the idea that borrowers themselves bear more responsibility for problems with credit than government regulators do.

In order to test the proposed hypotheses that attribution frames might help to overcome these patterns and boost people’s willingness to engage in political action, participants were asked to read a “press release describing a new proposal about overdraft fees,” which is depicted in Figure 2. The press release, which reflects a real-world reform, describes the problem of overdraft fees⁷ and outlines a policy solution derived from a real-world proposal. After reading the proposal, participants were asked whether they supported or opposed the reform on a scale from one to five, where one equals “strongly oppose” and five equals “strongly support.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, seven in 10 respondents (70%) voiced support for the measure. This is consistent with relatively favorable opinions Americans voice for a variety of lending reforms.

Figure 2.

Overdraft reform proposal.

After reading the proposal and reporting their support, participants were randomly assigned to a control or one of five treatment groups, allowing for a between-subjects experimental design.⁸ Table 1 displays the text employed in the control and treatment groups.

Table 1.

Experimental Treatments.

Control	“Still thinking about the proposal to change overdraft fees from the previous page, if a consumer organization asked you to take any of the following actions to voice your support for this proposal to change overdraft fees, how likely would you be to do each?”
Government prime	“Still thinking about the proposal to change overdraft fees from the previous page, supporters of this proposal argue that policymakers in Congress and in federal government agencies are responsible for passing laws to protect people like you when you use financial services like bank accounts and ATM cards. If a consumer organization asked you to take any of the following actions to voice your support for this proposal to change overdraft fees, how likely would you be to do each?”
Competitive rebuttal	“Still thinking about the proposal to change overdraft fees from the previous page, supporters of this proposal argue that policymakers in Congress and in federal government agencies are responsible for passing laws to protect people like you when you use financial services like bank accounts and ATM cards. Critics of this proposal argue that people like you are responsible for making smart decisions when you use financial services like bank accounts and ATM cards. If a consumer organization asked you to take any of the following actions to voice your support for this proposal to change overdraft fees, how likely would you be to do each?”
Co-optive frame	“Still thinking about the proposal to change overdraft fees from the previous page, critics of this proposal argue that people like you are responsible for making smart decisions when you use financial services like bank accounts and ATM cards. Supporters of this proposal actually agree, but they argue that people like you can’t make smart financial decisions unless government policymakers in Congress and in federal agencies pass laws that require banks to give you clear, accurate, and easy to understand information about financial products and services. If a consumer organization asked you to take any of the following actions to voice your support for this proposal to change overdraft fees, how likely would you be to do each?”
Consumer similarity	“Still thinking about the proposal to change overdraft fees from the previous page, supporters of this proposal argue that shopping for financial products and services, like bank accounts and ATM cards, is very similar to shopping for other goods and services. That’s why supporters argue that government policymakers in Congress and in federal agencies are responsible for passing laws to protect us from unsafe and deceptive financial practices too. If a consumer organization asked you to take any of the following actions to voice your support for this proposal to change overdraft fees, how likely would you be to do each?”
Economic security similarity	“Still thinking about the proposal to change overdraft fees from the previous page, supporters of this proposal argue that using financial products and services, like bank accounts and ATM cards, can affect people’s financial security too. That’s why supporters argue that government policymakers in Congress and in federal agencies are responsible for passing laws to help us be financially secure by limiting risky banking practices too. If a consumer organization asked you to take any of the following actions to voice your support for this proposal to change overdraft fees, how likely would you be to do each?”

The “government prime” treatment is designed to test the first hypothesis: that simply exposing someone to a frame attributing responsibility for consumer financial protection to government will increase the person’s willingness to engage in political action to support the proposed reform (Table 1). As discussed previously, however, it is rare for people to be exposed to a single frame for any issue. Instead, most people simultaneously hold competing considerations about an issue at any given time. Scholars have demonstrated, therefore, that to maximize the external validity of information-based experiments like this one, both sides of an argument should be presented. In many cases, this so-called competitive framing reduces or eliminates the effect of the initial information treatment under consideration—in this instance, government’s responsibility for financial regulation—because it no longer promotes the salience of only one belief or opinion (Chong and Druckman, 2007; Sniderman and Theriault, 2004).

In accordance with this logic, the “competitive rebuttal” treatment introduces an element of competitive framing. Beyond receiving information that primes government’s responsibility to protect consumer finances, participants in the second treatment group were also told that some disagree with that notion, instead believing that consumers are responsible for protecting their own finances. Personal responsibility was chosen as the rebuttal, or competitive, frame to align with the idea (supported by the survey data) that it is the most commonly held attitude about consumer financial protection.

Finally, a third treatment employs a different type of framing. Rather than trying to rebut the notion of personal responsibility, the “co-optive framing” treatment attempts to turn the personal responsibility frame from an argument against support into a justification for government regulation. It allows us to see whether personal responsibility attributions can be co-opted as a reason to support greater government intervention, if that intervention is framed as facilitating borrower’s ability to be responsible market actors. Such an approach might be more likely to work with people’s existing beliefs about consumer finances.

The potential for these attribution frames to boost people’s willingness to take political action in support of the overdraft proposal—particularly when presented in the competitive or co-optive contexts—may be limited by the considerable weight people already ascribe to personal responsibility attributions. So, what alternatives exist? Rhetoric from consumer advocates offer another approach: perhaps drawing a parallel between consumer finance and other consumer goods might help make the case for political action to support regulation. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s strategy of likening consumer financial products and services to a toaster provides one example of this method:

“It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. ... Similarly, it is impossible to change the price on a toaster once it has been purchased. ... [I]t is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street... [And] long after the papers have been signed, it is possible to triple the price of the credit used to finance the purchase of [an] appliance, even if the customer meets all the credit terms, in full and on time.” (Warren, 2007)

The “consumer similarity” treatment reflects Warren’s logic, and it offers the first test of hypothesis two. Is this an effective way to mobilize people politically on behalf of lending reform? On the one hand, drawing similarities between the regulation of goods like food and drugs and the regulation of credit makes sense. Agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are quite popular among the public, and most people consistently support the safety regulations they enforce. But there are also reasons to be cautious. If borrowers have been taught to view consumer finance as a personal and not a political issue, the opposite may be true of food and drug regulation. Anyone who has shopped for meat in their local grocery store or a pain reliever in the pharmacy aisle knows to expect the seal of governmental approval on the packaging. Consumers are thus conditioned to see government’s role in the regulation of these goods. Without that same conditioning, how likely are Americans’ to accept the comparison of something like food and drugs with consumer credit?

The logic of this approach is sound, but perhaps a better comparison exists. If, as many scholars argue, consumer financing is not so much a good as it is an alternative form of financial support (see Prasad, 2012; SoRelle 2020), in essence a substitute form of welfare, then framing consumer financial protection as akin to other popular policies governments implement to insulate us from economic shocks might be a better approach. The final treatment takes this tactic, drawing parallels between consumer financial protection and other measures to reduce economic insecurity. This is also appealing because, while the comparison holds, it makes use of a more distinctive policy alternative. Using alternative frames—frames that shift attention to a different type of argument or, in this case, issue, have been shown to overcome the effects of more entrenched attitudes (Jerit, 2009).

After receiving their respective treatments, each participant rated how likely they would be on a scale from one to five, where one equals “very unlikely” and five equals “very likely,” to contact their member of Congress, to contact a federal agency “like the Federal Trade Commission⁹,” or to contact their bank. Three represents the threshold at which people become more likely than not to take a particular action. By comparing the difference in mean response between the control group and each treatment, we can determine if and how each of these attribution frames influences participants’ willingness to act on behalf of the proposed reform. The first two requested actions represent forms of political engagement, while the third is a market-based response that we might expect an individual who embraces the idea of personal responsibility to be more inclined to take.

What are Consumers Willing to Do?

Before we explore the effect of the experimental treatments on people’s willingness to take political action to support the overdraft reform, it seems prudent to see the baseline responses provided by the control group. Figure 3 reports the mean willingness of participants in the control group to take each of the three requested actions to voice support for the overdraft proposal. These results only include those who reported some support for the measure, since we would not expect opponents of the measure to take action to support reform.

Figure 3.

Mean willingness to act in support of overdraft reform proposal by type of action.

The first notable takeaway from these results is that, on average, people were more willing to contact their bank than either their member of Congress or a federal agency to support the proposal (Figure 3). The baseline response from the control group suggests that the average participant who favored the proposal was somewhat willing to contact their bank to voice that support, but they expressed ambivalence toward contacting either their member of Congress or an agency like the FTC. This outcome suggests that even proponents of a popular reform are reluctant to engage politically to push for the measure’s adoption, and it reflects our expectations for an issue defined by attributions of personal responsibility.

Priming Government’s Role

In the case of consumer finance, can reminding people that government is indeed responsible for protecting consumers overcome their tendency to attribute blame to themselves enough to drive them to political action? Figure 4 depicts the difference in participants’ mean willingness to contact their member of Congress and their bank for each of the first three treatments.¹⁰

Figure 4.

Effect of government, competitive, and co-optive framing on likelihood of action by type of action. Note: Points represent means with 95% confidence interval bars. Treatment effects of both government prime and competitive rebuttal on contacting Congress are statistically significant (p < .05). Treatment effect of government prime on contacting the FTC is marginally significant (p < .1). Full results for the models are available in Appendix Table A1.

Reminding people of the role government plays in protecting their finances produced a statistically meaningful increase in participants’ willingness to contact their member of Congress to support the overdraft reform (Figure 4). Receiving the government attribution frame corresponded with a third of a point increase in people’s likelihood of taking that specific political action. The positive effect of the government frame on this political action persists even when controlling for participants’ individual characteristics. The same frame generated a marginally significant (p < .1) boost of about two-tenths of a point in participants’ mean willingness to contact the FTC. Receiving the government attribution frame does not result in a significant difference in people’s willingness to contact their bank, confirming that the treatment is specifically encouraging a political response.

The participatory boost that comes from priming government’s role in consumer financial protection is weakened somewhat when placed in a competitive context. Participants who were exposed to the rebuttal treatment still reported a statistically significant increase of about two-tenths of a point in their willingness to contact their member of Congress to support the overdraft proposal, but no such boost occurred for contacting the FTC. Once again, it produced no movement with respect to a bank.

The final treatment, which attempted to reframe government’s role in financial protection in terms that already resonate with borrowers’ considerations about personal responsibility, was the least effective; participants were not moved for any of the three actions. The result suggests that a government attribution frame that simultaneously emphasizes the salience of personal responsibility is counterproductive for political mobilization. It seems clear that personal responsibility is a poison pill when it comes to political action on consumer finance: when people think about borrowers’ responsibility for their financial affairs, it depresses political mobilization.

Shifting the Focus through Comparison

The previous experimental results tell us that simply reminding people that government has a role to play in regulating consumer finance can only do so much to boost borrowers’ political engagement on behalf of lending reform. So, what other strategies exist to mobilize ordinary Americans to support consumer financial protection? Another alternative is to employ similarity scenarios that draw on stronger, preexisting attitudes people might have that attribute responsibility to government for a different, though related, policy area. Can comparing consumer finance to the regulation of food and drugs or to social policies that promote economic security make people rethink government’s role in financial regulation and boost their willingness to take political action in support of financial reform?

Figure 5 presents the results of these two similarity scenarios. The consumer similarity scenario fails to produce a statistically significant boost in a person’s reported willingness to contact their member of Congress or the FTC to support the overdraft proposal. Nor does it move the needle for contacting a bank. It may be the case that emphasizing consumer protection—in a parallel effect to referencing personal responsibility—simply reinforces the notion that consumer behavior of any type is a market issue, thus limiting the efficacy of that comparison as a political mobilizer. Another possibility is that consumers, like some economists and industry professionals, disagree with the underlying premise that financial products are equivalent to other types of consumer goods, making the comparison irrelevant.

Figure 5.

Effect of similarity scenarios on likelihood of action by type of action. Note: Points represent means with 95% confidence interval bars. Treatment effects of the economic similarity scenario on contacting Congress and the FTC are statistically significant (p < .05). Treatment effect of the economic similarity scenario on contacting a bank is marginally significant (p < .1). Full results for the models are available in Appendix Table A2.

Comparing consumer financial protection to policies that protect us from economic insecurity more broadly is a different story. The likelihood of contacting a member of Congress to support the overdraft proposal rose by four-tenths of a point for the average participant exposed to the economic security frame.¹¹

Indeed, across all of the attribution framing approaches tested, only the non-competitive government prime produces a statistically equivalent boost in people’s willingness to contact either their member of Congress or the FTC to support the overdraft reform on par with that of the economic similarity scenario. Table 2 shows the difference in means between the economic security scenario and each of the other alternative attribution treatments for all three types of action. Compared with the competitive rebuttal frame, the economic similarity scenario produces a fifth of a point boost in willingness to contact Congress and nearly a quarter-point boost for the FTC. When compared with the co-optive frame, the economic similarity scenario produces about a third of a point boost in both types of political action. Finally, when compared with the consumer similarity scenario, the economic security frame produces about a quarter-point boost in willingness to take both political actions (as well as a similar boost in bank contact).

Table 2.

Effect of Similarity Scenarios on Likelihood of Action by Type of Action.

	Economic-Government	Economic-Competitive	Economic-Co-optive	Economic-Consumer
Contact Congress
Difference	.08	.20*	.35*	.26*
SE	.11	.11	.11	.11
Contact FTC
Difference	.14	.23*	.30*	.26*
SE	.11	.11	.11	.11
Contact bank
Difference	.03	.13	.15	.22*
SE	.11	.11	.11	.11

*p < .05, +p < .1 for one-tailed testEconomic scenario is the “treatment” category for each of the above comparisons; means and sample sizes for each group can be inferred from Appendix Tables A1 and A2.

The power of the economic security scenario may stem from the fact that it compares consumer financial protection to policies, like tax breaks and social programs, that most Americans understand are products of government policymaking. By that logic, the economic similarity scenario is combatting the specific attribution problem of government visibility. A second possibility is that, in referencing programs that many Americans understand to be earned government benefits, the scenario promotes consumer financial protection not as a market issue but as one of democratic citizenship. It is important to note, however, that the economic security scenario does not offer a competitive frame, and future work should explore the extent to which these findings are robust to a competitive context.

Discussion and Conclusion

We can take away a few important lessons from these experimental results. Most notably, these findings suggest that attribution frames show some promise for overcoming the demobilizing lessons that privatizing policies teach people about their own responsibility for an increasingly broad range of issues. But different frames produce different outcomes. First, while attribution frames that simply remind people that government is responsible for legislating on an issue—in this case, consumer financial protection—might be sufficient to increase their willingness to respond to an appeal for political action, the effect is weakened in the presence of conflicting arguments. Second, attempting to connect people’s beliefs about personal responsibility for an issue to a government attribution frame is not a productive way to politically mobilize borrowers. If anything, the reverse appears to be true.

The key, as this paper finds, may be to find an appropriate comparison—one characterized by preexisting attitudes that assign policymaking responsibility to governmental actors—to use for a similarity scenario. This can, of course, be a difficult task as more and more policies are reformed to emphasize market behaviors. In the case of consumer financial protection, highlighting other policies that address economic security appears to be a successful strategy. One could imagine employing such a tactic for a variety of other regulatory policies where the policy design and implementation attenuate the link between policymaker and policy beneficiary. But what about for other arenas where the neoliberal turn has prompted people to attribute policy outcomes to personal responsibility? Future research is necessary to identify policy-specific comparisons, but we could imagine, for example, that Medicare might work as a comparison for government-subsidized employer-provided healthcare. A more complex case undoubtedly arises when personal responsibility narratives are driven more by racialized narratives of responsibility and deservingness (e.g., TANF) than by marketizing logic. Once again, future research could explore how different feedback mechanisms require different forms of attribution framing to help counteract them, as well as the limits of attribution framing to address depoliticizing feedbacks.

There are also, of course, limitations to the extent to which these results should be generalized from the survey context to the real world. People often over report their willingness to take a hypothetical action. That said, there is no theoretical reason to believe that the tendency to over report is greater for members of the control versus the treatment groups in these experiments, hopefully signaling real shifts in potential action. Of more concern is the fact that the effects of attempts like these to reframe an issue are notoriously short lived. It is unlikely that any of these methods will permanently reshape people’s underlying beliefs about consumer financial protection if they only receive the frame once. Even a temporary shift, however, might be enough to instigate political action in response to a discrete request, perhaps in the form of an email action appeal or other forms of grassroots lobbying. To produce a more lasting effect, elites would need to employ these frames consistently enough to shift the policy narrative (see Stone, 1989) more broadly. In the absence of a major (and spontaneous) sea change in the design and implementation of policies that create personal responsibility attributions among the public, it is these short-term remedies and the potential for broader reframing that may provide the best path forward for those who want to instigate political mobilization to support policy reform.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-apr-10.1177_1532673X211063215 – Supplemental Material for From Personal Responsibility to Political Mobilization: Using Attribution Frames to Overcome Policy Feedback Effects

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-apr-10.1177_1532673X211063215 for From Personal Responsibility to Political Mobilization: Using Attribution Frames to Overcome Policy Feedback Effects by Mallory E. SoRelle in American Politics Research

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mallory E. SoRelle

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Appendix

Table A1.

Effect of Government Treatments on Likelihood of Contacting Congress, FTC, and a Bank (for Full Sample and Banked Only).

	Control		Government Prime		Competitive Rebuttal		Co-optive Framing
	Full	banked	full	banked	full	banked	full	banked
Contact Congress
Mean	2.79	2.77	3.10	3.08	2.98	2.96	2.82	2.81
N	252	194	248	193	252	195	255	206
Difference	—	—	.31*	.31*	.19*	.19⁺	.03	.03
Contact FTC
Mean	2.70	2.66	2.89	2.80	2.78	2.73	2.71	2.66
N	252	194	248	193	252	195	255	206
Difference	—	—	.17⁺	.14	.08	.07	.01	.00
Contact bank
Mean	3.24	3.25	3.35	3.33	3.25	3.24	3.24	3.23
N	252	194	248	193	252	195	255	206
Difference	—	—	.11	.08	.00	.01	.01	.02

*p < .05, +p < .1 for one-tailed test. Results correspond with Figure 4 in the main text.

Table A2.

Effect of Similarity Scenario Treatments on Likelihood of Contacting Congress, FTC, and a Bank (for Full Sample and Banked Only).

	Control		Consumer Similarity		Economic Security Similarity
	Full	banked	full	banked	full	banked
Contact Congress
Mean	2.79	2.77	2.91	2.86	3.17	3.18
N	252	194	252	191	255	195
Difference	—	—	.12	.09	.39 *	.41 *
Contact FTC
Mean	2.70	2.66	2.75	2.73	3.01	2.97
N	252	194	252	191	255	195
Difference	—	—	.05	.07	.31*	.31*
Contact bank
Mean	3.24	3.25	3.16	3.17	3.38	3.42
N	252	194	252	191	255	195
Difference	—	—	.08	−.07	.14	.17⁺

*p < .05, ⁺p < .1 for one-tailed test. Results correspond with Figure 5 in the main text.

Table A3.

Effect of Similarity Scenario Treatments on Likelihood of Contacting Congress, FTC, and a Bank (for Those Who Agree with Underlying Scenario Premise).

	Control	Consumer Similarity Scenario	Economic Security Similarity Scenario
Contact Congress
Mean	2.79	3.01	3.32
N	252	173	161
Difference	—	.23*	.54*
Contact FTC
Mean	2.70	2.82	3.12
N	252	173	161
Difference	—	.12	.42*
Contact bank
Mean n	3.24	3.28	3.51
N	252	173	161
Difference	—	.04	.27*

*p < .05, ⁺p < .1 for one-tailed test. Results restricted to only participants in the respective treatment groups who did not oppose government regulation of consumer goods/intervention to protect economic security.

Table A4.

Descriptive Statistics of Survey Sample.

	2017 Attribution Frame Survey	ANES 2012
Gender
% Female	50	52
% Male	50	48
Race
% White	69	59
% Non-White	31	41
Age
Range	18–73	17–75+
Mean	42	48
Education
% <High School degree	2	10
% High School Credential	19	25
% Some College	39	33
% Bachelor’s degree	27	19
% Graduate degree	12	12
Median Category	Some College	Some College
Income
% <$25,000	22	31
% $25,000–49,999	26	24
% $50,000–74,999	18	17
% $75,000–99,999	14	11
% $100,000–124,999	10	7
% $125,000–149,999	4	3
% $150,000+	6	7
Median Category	$50,000–74,999	$25,000–49,999
Party ID
% Democrat	39	40
% Republican	27	24
% Independent	35	36

References

Ajzen

(1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T

Ajzen

Fishbein

(1980). Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Baradaran

(2015). How the other half banks: Exclusion, exploitation, and the threat to democracy. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Bolsen

(2013). A light bulb goes on: norms, rhetoric, and actions for the public good. Political Behavior, 35(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-011-9186-5

Bolsen

James

Cook

F. L.

(2014). Communication and collective actions: a survey experiment on motivating energy conservation in the U.S. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 1(1), 24-38. https://doi.org/10.1017/xps.2014.2.

Chong

Druckman

J. N.

(2007). Framing theory. Annual Review of Political Science, 10, 103-126. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.072805.103054.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2013). CFPB study of overdraft programs. http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201306_cfpb_ whitepaper_overdraft-practices.pdf.

Converse

(1964). The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics. In Apter

David

(Ed.), Ideology and Discontent. New York: Free Press.

DouglasArnold

(1990). The logic of congressional action. New Haven: Yale University Press.

10.

Druckman

J. N.

(2004). Political preference formation. American Political Science Review, 98(4), 671–686. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055404041413

11.

Druckman

Lupia

(2000). Preference Formation. Annual Review of Political Science, 3(1), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.3.1.1.

12.

Entman

R. M.

(1993). Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x

13.

Fazio

(2007). Attitudes as object–evaluation associations of varying strength. Social Cognition, 25(5), 603-637. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.603.

14.

Feldman

(1988). Structure and consistency in public opinion: the role of core beliefs and values. American Journal of Political Science, 32(2), 416–440. https://doi.org/10.2307/2111130

15.

Gamson

W. A.

Andre

(1989). Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: a constructionist approach. American Journal of Sociology, 95(1), 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1086/229213

16.

Hacker

J. S.

(1998). The historical logic of national health insurance: structure and sequence in the development of British, Canadian, and US medical policy. Studies in American Political Development, 12(1), 57–130. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X98001308

17.

Hacker

(2006). The great risk shift. New York: Oxford University Press.

18.

Hackett

(2019). Attenuated governance: how policymakers insulate private school choice from legal challenge. Policy Studies Journal, 47(2), 237-273. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12327.

19.

Hall

P. A.

(1986). Governing the economy: The politics of state intervention in britain and France. New York: Oxford University Press.

20.

Heider

(1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley.

21.

Howard

(1997). The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

22.

Hyman

(2011). Debtor nation: The history of America in red ink. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

23.

Iyengar

(1990). Framing responsibility for political issues: the case of poverty. Political Behavior, 12, 19–40. https://www-jstor-org-443.web.bisu.edu.cn/stable/586283

24.

Jerit

(2009). How predictive appeals affect policy opinions. American Journal of Political Science, 53(2), 411-426. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00378.x.

25.

Kirsch

Mayer

R. N.

(2013). Financial justice: The people's campaign to stop lender abuse. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

26.

Kreuter

Presser

Tourangeau

(2008). Social desirability bias in CATI, IVR, and web surveys: the effects of mode and question sensitivity. Public Opinion Quarterly, 72(5), 847-865. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfn063.

27.

Krippner

G. R.

(2011). Capitalizing on crisis: The political origins of the rise of finance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

28.

Krosnick

Petty

(1995). Attitude Strength: An Overview. In Petty

Richard

Krosnick

Jon

(Eds.), Attitude Strength: Antecedents and Consequences (pp. 1-24). New York: Psychology Press.

29.

Lowi

(1972). Four systems of policy, politics, and choice. Public Administration Review, 32(4), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.2307/974990

30.

Lupia

McCubbins

(1998). The democratic dilemma: Can citizens learn what they need to know? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

31.

McCarty

Poole

K. T.

Howard

(2013). Political bubbles: Financial crises and the failure of American democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

32.

Mettler

(2011). The submerged state: how invisible government policies undermine American democracy. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

33.

Mettler

(2018). The government-citizen disconnect. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

34.

Mettler

SoRelle

(2017). Policy feedback theory. In Sabatier

P. A.

Weible

(Eds.), Theories of the Policy Process (4th Ed). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

35.

Mutz

(1998). Impersonal influence: How perceptions of mass collectives affect political attitudes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

36.

Nelson

T. E.

Clawson

R. A.

September

Z. M. O.

(1997). Media framing of a civil liberties conflict and its effect on tolerance. The American Political Science Review, 91(3), 567–583. https://doi.org/10.2307/2952075

37.

Prasad

(2012). The land of too much: American abundance and the paradox of poverty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

38.

Sahar

(2014). On the Importance of Attribution Theory in Political Psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8(5), 229-249. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12102.

39.

Skocpol

(1992). Protecting soldiers and mothers: The political origins of social policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

40.

Sniderman

P. M.

Theriault

S. M.

(2004). The structure of political argument and the logic of issue framing. In Saris

W. E.

Sniderman

P. M.

(Eds.). Studies in Public Opinion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 133–165.

41.

Soss

(1999). Lessons of welfare: policy design, political learning, and political action. American Political Science Review, 93(2), 363–380. https://doi.org/10.2307/2585401.

42.

Soss

Fording

Sanford

(2011). Disciplining the poor. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

43.

Soss

Weaver

(2017). Police Are Our government: politics, political science, and the policing of race-class subjugated communities. Annual Review of Political Science, 20, 565–591. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-060415-093825

44.

SoRelle

M. E.

(2020). Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

45.

Steinmo

Ann Thelen

Frank

(1992). Structuring politics: Historical institutionalism in comparative analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

46.

Stone

(1989). Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas. Political Science Quarterly, 104(2), 281–300. https://doi.org/10.2307/2151585

47.

Tourangeau

Rips

Rasinski

(2000). The psychology of survey response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

48.

Visser

George

Krosnick

(2006). Exploring the latent structure of strength-related attitude attributes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 1–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38001-X

49.

Visser

Krosnick

Simmons

J. P.

(2003). Distinguishing the cognitive and behavioral consequences of attitude importance and certainty: a new approach to testing the common factor hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 118–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1031(02)00522-X

50.

Warren

(2007). Unsafe at any rate. Democracy, 5, 8. https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/5/unsafe-at-any-rate/.

51.

Zaller

(1992). The nature and origins of mass opinion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

52.

Zaller

Feldman

(1992). A simple theory of the survey response: answering questions versus revealing preferences. American Journal of Political Science, 36(3), 579-616. https://doi.org/10.2307/2111583.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.07 MB