Accountability in Government Contracting Arrangements: Experimental Analysis of Blame Attribution Across Levels of Government

Abstract

While governments increasingly turn to third-party providers to deliver public services and government responsibilities are increasingly shifted from the federal to the state and local levels, both contracting and the division of powers under federalism blur lines of accountability. Because recent experiments on blame shifting find mixed results and citizens have different expectations of federal, state, and local government, we ask the following: How does blame attribution in third-party governance compare across levels of government? To address this question, we employ a timely survey experiment to examine who is responsible for a prisoner’s death in the case of interstate prisoner transport, which is one of the few services that is provided across all levels of government and by government contractors. The results show that contracting reduces the level of blame attributed to the government and that blame for contract failures varies by the level of government. Across levels of government, we find the local government sees the largest reduction in blame by contracting out. Findings have implications for accountability in contracting arrangements in public safety contexts.

Taking a Shot: The Impact of Information Frames and Channels on Vaccination Willingness in a Pandemic

“…A 2 × 2 between-subjects survey experiment that manipulated vignettes presented to research participants was used to test the hypotheses [ 49 , 50 ]. Participants were administered treatments where the channel and framing of the health information in each vignette were randomly assigned.…”

“…Attention or memory checks were the final questions administered to check if respondents paid attention to the questions asked [ 49 , 50 ]. The attention check question asked the number of months it took to develop a vaccine for the virus responsible for the hypothetical pandemic.…”

“…The attention check question asked the number of months it took to develop a vaccine for the virus responsible for the hypothetical pandemic. In the robustness analysis, we use the sample of only the respondents who passed the attention check [ 49 , 50 ]. Furthermore, browser and URL blockers were activated to ensure that only individuals residing in the United States participated in the survey.…”

When blame avoidance backfires: Responses to performance framing and outgroup scapegoating during the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Further, they contribute to the public management literature on blame avoidance by exploring blame attribution in a context of public health outcomes that are highly salient, rapidly changing, and related to intense concerns about personal safety across society. While past research has explored blame attribution in the context of crises (Bisgaard, 2015 ) and government contracting (Leland et al., 2021 ), blame avoidance research more typically considers how public opinion might be influenced by blame shifting to other political opponents or governments (Hong et al., 2020 ), rather than how the public responds when other members of the public may be included among the targets of blame. Further research has explored how the use of racial epithets impacts attitudes toward ethnic groups (Dhanani & Franz, 2021 ).…”

What Sector Do Consumers Prefer for the Delivery of ‘Public’ Services? A Comparative Analysis of the US and China

“…Although existing literature offers explanations as to why public services should be delivered either directly by government, the private sector, or nonprofit organizations (Hansmann, 1980;Savas, 2000), as well as of the existence of such services (AbouAssi et al, 2019), little research has examined the public's attitudes about how they prefer to have public services delivered (see Handy et al, 2010). This gap is surprising given that there is a literature that shows that the public has preferences about whether the federal, state, or local governments should deliver services in a specific policy area (Leland et al, 2021a(Leland et al, , 2021bMaestas et al, 2020;Schneider et al, 2010;Schneider & Jacoby, 2003). This article seeks to add to the discussion on the delivery of services moving from questions currently focused on efficiency and effectiveness (see Hodge, 2018) to incorporating how the public prefers to have these services delivered, using comparable surveys of individuals in the US and China.…”