A Name to Blame for Trains: The Role of Attribution in Accountability∗
Year: 2016
Type: preprint
Abstract: People use government-provided public services every day, but do they hold politicians accountable for the performance of these services? This paper uses a novel data source to assess accountability: administrative performance data from a large urban transportation authority linked to surveys of individuals’ opinions. These combined data allow me to take advantage of exogenous variation in performance in a natural experiment. In addition, I test the importance of attribution on citizens’ ability to make retrospective judgments when there is confusion about responsibility. I find that citizens connect real-world performance with evaluations of government only when provided with experimental cues about government responsibility. However, these judgments are susceptible to cognitive biases that favor recent information, stunting the ability of citizens to reflect on cumulative performance over time. Broadly, these results demonstrate that accountability is complicated by confusion of responsibility, and potentially threatened by the ease with which blame and credit can be shifted.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Justin De Benedictis-Kessner
Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Public Administration
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3123949241