Elections are the main mechanism that citizens use to make governments accountable. According to most of the literature, voters will evaluate retrospectively the performance of the government to decide their vote. But whereas it is clear that certain institutional factors such as the multi-level structure of government or the existence of a coalition government  make more difficult the assessment of the responsibilities, it is still unknown which is the role of identities on it. Focusing on the specific case of the economic crisis, in this paper we argue that confronting national and regional identities –in contrast to nested ones– are able to explain whether citizens blame the national or the regional government. Using data from the MEDW project (Blais, 2000) we confirm our expectations with data from Catalonia and Madrid (Spain) and Bavaria and Lower Saxony (Germany).