Citizen Attributions of Blame in Third‐Party Governance

Abstract

Th e authors use a survey experiment to examine how structural diff erences in governance arrangements aff ect citizens' notions of who is culpable for poor service quality. More specifi cally, two questions are investigated: (1) When things go wrong, do citizens attribute more blame to political actors if the provider of government services is a public agency or a private contractor? (2) Does the length of the accountability chain linking political actors to service providers infl uence citizens' attributions of blame? Th e authors hypothesize that provider sector and accountability chain length aff ect citizens' perceptions of political actors' control over service delivery, which, in turn, inform citizens' attributions of blame. Mixed support is found for this theory. Practitioner Points• Citizens view local political actors as having more control over public service delivery when services are provided directly by a public organization (versus a private organization). • Political actors cannot avoid blame for poor service quality by using private organizations to deliver services.• Th e contracting out of local public services to private sector providers does not appear to seriously undermine political accountability.We then draw on theories of blame attribution to develop hypotheses concerning how service provider sector and accountability chain length aff ect individuals' perceptions of political control and, in turn, the amount of blame that individuals ascribe to political actors for poor service delivery. Next, we describe our research design and data. After presenting our results, we close the article with a discussion of our fi ndings' implications for accountability in the context of third-party governance.

Bureaucratic accountability in third‐party governance: Experimental evidence of blame attribution during times of budgetary crisis

“…Introducing the fiscal crisis cue lessens the blame assigned to the contractor and reduces support for terminating the employment of both contract and government employees as the city is viewed as responsible for the budget shortfall. Unlike Marvel and Girth (), this study finds that the sector of the service provider, whether a government or a private company, significantly influences blame attribution.…”

“…Extending blame attribution from the political realm to the bureaucracy, we find similar results as the private contractor is blamed more than the city and employees. Like the present study, Marvel and Girth (2016) examine the issue of controllability, but in the context of political blame, where they find the public provider to have a significant indirect effect on blame through the perception of the mayor's control over the provider. We also find that controllability is vital to blame attribution.…”

Distance, services, and citizen perceptions of the state in rural Africa

“…However, the spatial gradient literature is largely silent on public versus private service provision and its possible influences on citizen perceptions of services and the government. Confounding factors include difficulties in distinguishing public from private provision, as, for example, when public health providers moonlight on the side, or when citizens are unaware of the source of services (Marvel & Girth, ; Stel & Ndayiragije, ; Tuan, Dung, Neu, & Dibley, )…”

“…There is debate over whether, for instance, an improvement in government outputs accrues to the benefit of central officials, local officials, or both, and over whether specific actors or institutions are seen as more or less trustworthy. Some scholars argue that attributions based on service provision are most likely based on visibility and perceived control (Marvel & Girth, ; Mcloughlin, ; Stel & Ndayiragije, ). To the extent local officials are more visible to rural residents than are distant national government representatives, we would expect attributions related to service provision to center on subnational government actors.…”

Citizen satisfaction under changing political leadership: The role of partisan motivated reasoning

“…This presumption gets further support from key insights of the blame attribution literature (e.g., Hood, ; Malhotra & Kuo, ; McGraw, ; Mortensen, ; Weaver, ). Indeed, functional responsibility, and consecutively blame, is attributed to political principals even when causal responsibility is delegated to third parties (James, Jilke, Petersen, & Van de Walle, ; Marvel & Girth, ; but see also Overman, ). Yet, when lines of responsibility get blurred, blame tends to weaken (see also Jilke, Petrovsky, Meuleman, & James, ).…”