Appraisals of President Obama's economic performance: Racial resentment and attributional responsibility

In this research, we show that positive and negative framings of the economy motivated racial resentments and consonant judgments among Whites about President Obama's responsibility for the economy. Using experimental data collected in the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we find that Whites attributed more responsibility to Obama under negative economic conditions (i.e., blame) than positive economic conditions (i.e., credit). Partisanship influenced both patterns, but racial resentment matters only among Democrats and Independents, not Republicans. We also compared President Obama to governors, and found that Whites attributed equal responsibility to the President and governors for negative economic conditions, but gave more responsibility to governors than Obama for positive conditions. Whites also gave governors more responsibility for state improvements than they gave Obama for national ones. Our findings highlight the likely inescapability of racial biases regardless of positive information or shared political identity.