Public Accountability beyond Institutional Control. Who do Citizens Blame for Failures in Governing Systemic Risk?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why are public institutions blamed for crises caused by private actors’ mismanagement? Building on accountability theory, this study investigates the mechanisms of blame attribution during crises, when public institutions fail to prevent systemic risks caused by private sector agents. Data from a survey experiment with 1,626 Swiss citizens reveals how perceived situational control, causal responsibility, normative accountability expectations, and accountability performance shape citizens’ attribution of blame. The findings reveal asymmetries in the responsibility-accountability logic, showing that citizens hold public institutions accountable for private sector failures if they strongly believe that public institutions had causal responsibility and situational control over the crisis. Citizens’ normative expectations of public institutions’ obligation to govern systemic risks are strongly correlated with blame, while public institutions’ accountability performance is not associated with citizens’ blame attribution. These novel findings provide critical insights for policy makers to manage perceptions, maintain trust, and safeguard legitimacy during crises. The study advances accountability theory by highlighting the dynamic nature of blame, which is particularly relevant for crisis governance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".