When politicians and governments fail, people blame the other party no matter what they are told by experts

Government failure and inaction has become an increasingly common aspect of the U.S. political system, whether it is due to political polarization as in the government’s shutdown in 2013, or through poor planning, which characterized the rollout of the Obamacare website. But how do voters apportion blame for these sorts of failures? In new research, that tests how people react to expert testimony that apportions blame to a particular political party, Jeffrey Lyons and William P. Jaeger find that even when experts say otherwise, people still blame the party that rivals their own political views for the failure. They write that their findings go against the idea that a better informed electorate would be less partisan – in actuality, people simply ignore the extra information they are given if it challenges their beliefs.