No abstract

A longstanding debate about electoral behaviour has concerned whether voters biasedly attribute blame for government performance. However, a disproportionate focus on negative outcomes and partisan issues has left several empirical questions about responsibility attribution unanswered. In this letter, we attempt to answer these by looking at how voters respond to a positive, nonpartisan public health shock. Through a survey experiment embedded in the British Election Study, we test whether voters incorporated new information when assigning credit to the government for the successful early rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations in England. We find that, in general, voters indeed attributed less responsibility to government when given information suggesting other institutions deserved credit for the rollout. Moreover, using longitudinal measures of partisanship, we show that only the newest Government supporters fail to update their attributions. Our findings indicate that, when considering the wider universe of cases, pessimism about electoral accountability may be overstated.

Hierarchical accountability often proves insufficient to control street‐level implementation, where complex, informal accountability relations prevail and tasks must be prioritized. However, scholars lack a theoretical model of how accountability relations affect implementation behaviors that are inconsistent with policy. By extending the Accountability Regimes Framework (ARF), this paper explains how multiple competing subjective street‐level accountabilities translate into policy divergence. The anti‐terrorism “Prevent Duty” policy in the United Kingdom requires university lecturers to report any student they suspect may be undergoing a process of radicalization. We ask: what perceived street‐level accountabilities and dilemmas does this politically contested policy imply for lecturers, and how do they affect divergence? An online survey of British lecturers (N = 809), combined with 35 qualitative follow‐up interviews, reveals that accountability dilemmas trigger policy divergence. The ARF models how street‐level bureaucrats become informal policymakers in the political system when rules clash with their roles as professionals, citizen‐agents, or “political animals.”