Research

Publications

  1. Judging the Blame Game: How Do Citizens React to Blame Shifting in Public Service Delivery? 2026. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. Open access link
Abstract

This article examines blame shifting, where elected officials attempt to deflect blame for negative outcomes onto other actors. While prior research suggests that citizens generally disapprove of this tactic, this study re-evaluates how contextual factors shape these reactions, focusing specifically on cases of public service failure. In many areas of public management, service delivery is delegated or contracted out to public or private organizations, raising the question of whether such institutional arrangements make it easier for politicians to shift blame onto these agents. A survey experiment (n = 955) was conducted in the United Kingdom involving a hypothetical public service failure. Information cues varied the response strategy of local elected officials (shifting blame or accepting responsibility) and the service delivery model (public or private sector; high or low delegation). The results from OLS regression analyses show that participants were generally less approving of blame shifting compared to accepting responsibility. However, approval increased when the organization being blamed was viewed by participants as carrying more blame for failures in service delivery than the official. Although delegation levels did not directly moderate the effect of blame shifting, further logistic regression analysis shows that higher delegation made participants more likely to view the service provider as culpable, which in turn influenced how they reacted to blame shifting tactics. These findings highlight the conditional nature of public reactions to blame avoidance behavior, showing that citizens’ evaluations of tactics like blame shifting depend on their beliefs about who is responsible, which can be shaped by institutional context. The study offers new insights into when blame shifting may appear more credible or justified and underscores the role of context in shaping the effectiveness of political blame avoidance strategies.

Under Review

  1. Public Service Delegation and the Mechanisms of Blame Attribution: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on Public Service Failure. Revise and resubmit at Public Administration Review. Draft available upon request.
Abstract

A growing body of experimental public administration research examines how structural arrangements in public services, such as delegating service delivery to public or private actors, shape citizens’ blame attributions for service failures. However, the mechanisms underlying these attributions are less well understood. This article investigates two such mechanisms, focusing on the mediating roles of citizens’ perceptions of politicians’ causal responsibility (perceived control over service delivery) and functional responsibility (perceived duty to ensure service quality). A UK-based survey experiment on local waste collection failures tests these mechanisms using causal mediation analysis. The results show that higher levels of delegation reduce blame primarily by lowering perceptions of politicians’ control over service delivery. In contrast, there is no strong evidence of mediation through perceived duty, suggesting that role-based expectations of functional responsibility are more resistant to change. These findings provide new insight into how institutional design influences blame attribution for service performance.

Works in Progress

  1. How Do We Establish the Influence of Blame Avoidance in Policymaking? Lessons from the Case of Public Health England. Draft available upon request.
Abstract

This paper examines methodological challenges in qualitatively studying blame avoidance behaviour in policymaking, focusing on how researchers can credibly infer blame avoidance motivations from case study evidence. Three key challenges are identified: the risk of assuming all policymakers are equivalent blame minimisers, the difficulty of gathering confirmatory evidence when actors may conceal their motivations, and the tendency to overlook rival explanations. To illustrate these challenges and demonstrate potential solutions, the paper analyses the UK government’s controversial decision to abolish Public Health England during the COVID-19 pandemic, a case widely interpreted as institutional scapegoating but lacking definitive proof. Applying qualitative Bayesian reasoning to systematically adjudicate between a blame avoidance hypothesis and two rival hypotheses (credit-seeking and structural reform bias), the analysis weighs available evidence from varied sources to test which hypothesis best explains the decision to abolish PHE. The findings show that whilst blame avoidance receives strongest evidential support, rival explanations cannot be definitively ruled out. This analysis demonstrates how systematic comparison of competing hypotheses, combined with explicit quantification of evidentiary weights, enables researchers to make more rigorous inferences about blame avoidance even when smoking gun evidence remains elusive, ultimately advancing research towards a domain where blame avoidance is defensibly inferred rather than assumed.

  1. Policy Crowding and Coupling: Mapping the Organisation of Policy Areas across UK Government. Draft available upon request.
Abstract

Contemporary systems of public administration are organised around distinct policy areas, each served by their own sets of specialised institutions demarcated by defined administrative boundaries. The degree of organisational involvement within any given policy area, but also the extent to which areas of policy are potentially connected through shared organisational attention, are dimensions of administrative structure that existing research has not systematically addressed. This paper introduces two concepts to capture these dimensions: policy crowding, referring to the degree and intensity to which a policy area is attended to by one or many organisations, and policy coupling, referring to the degree and intensity to which organisations work concurrently across multiple policy areas, creating linkages between them. Drawing on UK central government public expenditure data from 2010 to 2025, separate ways of measuring policy crowding and policy coupling in this context are developed. Both reveal notable variation in how departmental responsibility is distributed within policy areas and in how those areas of policy also relate to one another structurally.

  1. Do Blame Avoidance Strategies Work? Evidence from a Systematic Review.

  2. Emerging Innovations in Emergency Management: City Governments and the Rise of Risk Registers. With Martin Lodge (LSE).

  3. Sectoral Embedding or Centralised Capacity? Appointing AI Regulators in EU Member States.