Citizens' Blame of Politicians for Public Service Failure: Experimental Evidence about Blame Reduction through Delegation and Contracting

Abstract

He works on the public policy and politics of public services, citizen-provider relationships, public sector organization and reform, executive politics (particularly politician-administrator relations), and regulation of publicly owned and/or funded bodies and services. He also works on methodology for using experiments in public management research.

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

“…This study builds upon research that examines political blame when contracting out public service delivery. James et al () find that keeping public service delivery in‐house (provided directly by the government) reduces blame on local politicians when there are service issues. 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.…”

“…Scholars have begun to examine this question, but have focused on political blame. In an experiment on street maintenance, citizens were asked to what extent local government politicians were to blame and were given either no information about who is managing the service delivery or cues that it is a private firm, a unit inside the government, or the politicians (James et al ). The study finds that only the delegation to a public unit inside the government cue reduces blame on the local politicians (James et al ).…”

Never Change a Winning Policy? Public Sector Performance and Politicians' Preferences for Reforms

“…A third avenue for further research concerns the particular importance that information about negative performance assessments appears to hold. While negativity bias in citizens' and politicians' perception of performance has recently gained renewed attention (Hood and Dixon ; James et al ; Nielsen and Moynihan ; Olsen , ), the possible link between negative performance information and the “widely observed behavioural tendency of blame‐avoidance in politics and public administration” (James ; Hood ) has remained understudied. Therefore, we have at best a limited understanding of the translation of negative performance information into various forms of blame avoidance by, and blame shifting between, politicians and bureaucrats.…”

“…Recent (experimental) work on citizens' and politicians' responses to performance information likewise shows that especially information about negative performance induces stronger causal attribution of responsibility (Nielsen and Moynihan ; Olsen ). Decision makers are blamed for bad outcomes or unpopular decisions, but they do not receive equal credit for good outcomes or popular decisions (James et al ). This negativity bias provides decision makers with an incentive to “follow a mini‐max strategy and be more concerned with avoiding bad performances than with striving for excellence” (Olsen : 2; see also Hood and Dixon ).…”

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, ).…”