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This article examines the cognitive foundations of economic voting in four diverse

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The governmental response to Hurricane Katrina was widely perceived to be flawed and inadequate. However, given the number of actors involved in coordinating relief efforts, both in the private sector and at all levels of government, attributions of responsibility vary widely. Drawing on the Theory of Heterogeneous Attribution, we explore the relationship between political sophistication and assessments of blame for the delayed governmental response. Using data from a survey of Louisiana residents, we find that citizens at higher levels of sophistication are less likely to find the federal government chiefly to blame, and more likely to fault actors at the state level. Moreover, less sophisticated respondents tend to focus blame disproportionately on the president, a tendency to which the more sophisticated are not as prone. On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a strong ''Category 3'' storm with sustained winds of over 125 mph, came ashore just east of New Orleans, Louisiana. One of the most destructive storms ever to strike the U.S., Katrina caused widespread devastation across the central Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Yet, the destruction of property that always accompanies a landfalling major hurricane was in this case augmented by a heart-rending human catastrophe, as the breach of New Orleans's levees and floodwalls inundated over 80 percent of one of America's most historic cities and left thousands of people in desperate and dangerous situations. 1 In the days that followed, anger built among those directly affected by the storm and among those around the country and the world watching on television, as the response from the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation to a domestic tragedy seemed feeble and chaotic. Nearly 1,000 people were stranded without food or water at New Orleans's Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, approximately 26,000 residents were sheltered in the Louisiana Superdome without electricity or running water, and looting of stores and homeseven by members of the New Orleans Police Department-was rampant. It was a matter of weeks, not days, before a modicum of security and order was restored to

remain unanswered about how structuralist and individualistic attributions themselves are formed. Some scholars, most notably Kluegel and Smith (1986), provide a sociological explanation, arguing that socioeconomic status strongly shapes individuals' explanations for poverty. By this account, the difference in attribution patterns may merely be a function of social class-the "haves" think the "have-nots" are lazy, while the latter think the former benefit disproportionately from social arrangements. Perhaps the divergence runs deeper, stemming from psychological differences inherent in the construction of causality. After all, interpersonal attributions are a fundamental component of social cognition (Fiske and Taylor 1991). This raises a key question: Does an individual's cognitive complexity increase his or her likelihood of making certain causal linkages, while mitigating the perceived importance of competing explanatory factors?In this paper, we advance a theory of heterogeneous attribution, wherein individual differences in cognitive sophistication within a relevant domain condition the tendency to attribute responsibility to proximal (individualistic) or more global (structuralist) causes. We argue that individuals low in political sophistication, controlling for other factors