(De-)Centralisation and Attribution of Blame and Credit

Abstract

Assigning responsibility for political outcomes is complex in political systems where power is apportioned across local, regional and national levels of government. Does attribution of responsibility reflect the allocation of formal authority, as implied by literature on delegation and blame avoidance, or is it always the national level government that gets the blame when the media focus on failures and unpopular policy outcomes? In this article, I develop a set of hypotheses about public attribution of responsibility within a policy sector characterised by multiple tiers of government involvement. The hypotheses are tested using a novel dataset based on a content coding of responsibility attribution in more than 2000 newspaper articles about health care issues in Denmark. Decentralisation of formal authority does show a blame deflection effect in media coverage of health care issues, but the analysis also points to several factors that moderate the effect. In that way, the article advocates a renewed interest in the often invoked relationship between the institutional allocation of authority and public attribution of responsibility.