Recent research has shown that citizens living in decentralized countries struggle to identify which level of government is designing and implementing public policies, thus hindering the due accountability process of democracy. This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of citizens´ responsibility attribution by analyzing the Spanish case. A novel methodological approach is used by separately analyzing those citizens who fail to identify the competent level of government and those who did not even give an answer. Besides, two novel hypotheses are tested regarding the process by which information is transmitted to and absorbed by citizens: the impact of regional media and the territorial group bias. After confirming that the methodological strategy is correct, we find strong evidence that the existence of regional media helps responsibility attribution, thus fostering accountability; while co-official languages, used as a proxy of a group bias, hamper the process by which citizens identify the competent level of government.

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Introduction Countries around the world have embarked on significant decentralization programs over the last three decades for a variety of reasons (Rodr|¨guez-Pose and Sandall, 2008; Shah, 2007). Reasons include political bottom-up democratic pressures, fear of national territorial disintegration from ethnic or cultural separatist demands, or simply disillusionment with centralized systems of economic governance and the need to improve the overall efficiency of the public sector (Bird and Ebel, 2006; Boadway and Shah, 2009; Kyriacou and Roca-Sagale¨s, 2011; Lockwood, 2006). All these reasons can be found within the devolution process that took place in Spain during the last three decades (Lo¨pez-Laborda et al, 2007). The decentralization of the delivery of public goods and services should be followed by the implementation of a system of revenue assignments and intergovernmental fiscal grants that ensures the adequate financing of the functions decentralized to subnational units of government and equity in the distribution of resources (Musgrave, 1983). Generally, it is economically efficient to decentralize expenditure responsibilities to a larger extent than revenue sources (Oates, 1972). However, this tends to generate vertical fiscal imbalances across levels of government that need to be addressed with an adequately designed system of grants (Boadway and Shah, 2007). As grants become an integral part of the budgetary structure of subnational levels of government, they have proved vulnerable to the kind of political bargaining that affects any other government policy (

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