Environmental problems such as water scarcity plague communities globally. We lack comprehensive understanding about the public's preferences for different water policy instruments. In particular, the information environment we live in is filled with different blame attribution frames regarding these water problems. By merging blame attribution literatures to environmental issues, we ask the following question: Does blame attribution about the causes of water crises influence the public's water policy preferences? Within this theoretical framework, we explore the effects of (1) outsider blame (2) political gridlock blame (3) all stakeholders blame (4) individual resident blame. Using a factorial between-subject design with 2000 participants in three water stressed states in the southwest US, we suggest that blame frames are systematically associated with support for different types of policies and that such effects differ by personal water impact. Our findings contribute to scholarly understanding about the role of blame frames in shaping the public's environmental policy preferences.
Ahn et al. (2026) studied this question.