Research from Department of Economics featured in the Washington Post

Who is at fault for the current government shutdown in the US? Current polls suggest that the American public overwhelmingly blames Republicans in the House of Representatives. As noted by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, this is consistent with a general pattern of blame attribution in budget fights, identified in recent research by Asger Lau Andersen, Lasse Holbøll Westh Nielsen and Professor David Dreyer Lassen; they find, across US states for the period 1988-2007, that blame predominantly is being directed at the legislative majority rather than the executive under divided government, regardless of the partisan configuration.