Inflation played a big role in the outcome of this year's presidential election, but who to blame for it may have not been on the ballot.

About half of Trump voters cited high prices as the biggest issue affecting their vote, according to AP VoteCast , which surveyed over 115,000 voters nationwide. Almost 1 in 4 voters said inflation caused a severe hardship, according to exit polling data from Edison Research , with nearly three-quarters of them voting for Trump.

"Inflation is something that people deeply dislike, and that leaves lasting scars," Stefanie Stantcheva, a professor of political economy at Harvard University who recently did a study examining how people perceive inflation , wrote to Yahoo Finance. “And our findings suggest that many people blame the government for it.”

But the government may not be the right culprit. Who or what deserves the blame is harder to parse out. Even among economists, inflation, especially the source of its recent surge, is still hotly debated.

"Inflation is a really, really hard-to-understand phenomenon," Stantcheva said, "and economists disagree about its causes and consequences."