Presidential Confidence in Crisis: Blame, Media, and the BP Oil Spill.

Recent studies find that voters regularly punish presidents for seemingly unrelated events, despite a clear understanding of how these issues become tied to the president. We contend that the media plays an important role in creating this link. Testing this, we examined how the 2010 BP oil spill shaped evaluations of President Barack Obama, paying particular attention to news coverage to isolate the event's applicability to the president. We estimate the causal effect of these different frames by matching respondents from a prespill control group to two separate treatment phases, finding that presidential confidence decreases once the media begins attributing political blame, but not before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]