The partisan dilemma: How people evaluate sacrificial dilemma decisions by politicians across the political divide

Abstract Politicians often face policy decisions where sacrificing some targets benefits others. As motivations behind such decisions can be ambiguous, partisans may ascribe nobler motives to politicians who make decisions they approve of and whose party they identify with. Consequently, evaluations of politicians can be shaped by the politician's decision, party affiliation, the domain of sacrifice, and the evaluator's political orientation. Across three studies, the US and South American participants ( N = 1595) evaluated liberal/left‐wing and conservative/right‐wing politicians who accepted or rejected educational and economic sacrifices. We examined how participants' political orientation influenced judgments of sacrificial decisions. Conservative/Right‐wing political orientation frequently (though not always) predicted higher ratings of conservative/right‐wing politicians and lower ratings of liberal/left‐wing politicians across decision acceptability, vote‐worthiness, warmth, and competence—even when both politicians made the same choice. Study 2 demonstrated that the direction of bias depends on the policy domain, with liberal‐leaning participants less accepting of educational sacrifices and more accepting of economic sacrifices than conservative‐leaning participants. Study 2 further suggested that inferences about politicians' underlying motivations partly drive partisan bias. These findings demonstrate that judgments of realistic sacrificial dilemmas are significantly influenced by the social context—specifically, who is evaluating whom and over which issues.