Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-7drxs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-19T14:37:12.576Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Face of the Problem: How Subordinates Shield Executives from Blame

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2021

Sarah E. Croco ,
Jared McDonald Open the ORCID record for Jared McDonald [Opens in a new window]  and
Candace Turitto
Sarah E. Croco
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Jared McDonald*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Candace Turitto
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: jaredmcd@stanford.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Though avoiding blame is often a goal of elected officials, there are relatively few empirical examinations of how citizens assign blame during controversies. We are particularly interested in how this process works when an executive has been caught in a lie. Using two survey experiments, we examine whether subordinates can shield executives when they act as the face of a crisis. We first leverage a real-life situation involving the family separation crisis at the US–Mexico border in 2018. Respondents who read that Donald Trump falsely claimed he could not end the practice of family separation disapprove of his dishonesty. Yet this cost disappears when Trump’s then-Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, is the primary official discussed in news stories. We then replicate these findings in a fictional scenario involving a city mayor, showing that the mayor is partially shielded from negative appraisals when the city manager lies on his behalf.

Keywords

Blame avoidanceblame sharingdishonestypublic opinionsurvey experiments
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , Winter 2022 , pp. 359 - 368
Open Practices
Open data Open materials
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This article has earned badges for transparent research practices: Open Data and Open Materials. For details see the Data Availability Statement.

†

Coauthorship of this paper is equal and authors are listed in alphabetical order.

References

Achen, Chrisopher H. and Bartels, Larry M.. 2016. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alicke, Mark D. 2000. “Culpable control and the psychology of blame.” Psychological Bulletin 126(4): 556–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Arnold, R. Douglas. 1990. The Logic of Congressional Action. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Berinsky, Adam J., Huber, Gregory A. and Lenz, Gabriel S.. 2012. “Evaluating Online Labor Markets for Experimental Research: Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.” Political Analysis 20(3): 351–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blake, Aaron. 2018. “Kirstjen Nielsen’s mighty struggle to explain separating families at the border, annotated.” The Washington Post, June 19, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/06/19/kirstjen-nielsen-tries-to-explain-separating-families-at-the-border-annotated/ (accessed July 12, 2020).Google Scholar
Bovens, Mark, Hart, Paul’t, Dekker, Sander, and Verheuvel, Gerdien. 1999. “The Politics of Blame Avoidance: Defensive Tactics in a Dutch Crime-Wghting Fiasco,” In When Things go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns, ed. Anheier, H. K. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage: 123–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Busuioc, E. Madalina and Lodge, Martin. 2016. “The Reputational Basis of Public Accountability.” Governance 29(2): 247–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, David B. and Hult, Karen M.. 2020. “Contemporary Presidency: The Office of the Chief of Staff in the Trump White House, 2017–2019.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 50(2): 392–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coombs, W. Timothy. 1995. “Choosing the Right Words the Development of Guidelines for the Selection of the ’Appropriate’ Crisis-Response Strategies.” Management Communication Quarterly 8(4): 447–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croco, Sarah E., McDonald, Jared and Turitto, Candace. 2021. “The Face of the Problem: How Subordinates Shield Executives from Blame,” https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QJ9RLJ, Harvard Dataverse.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croco, Sarah E., Hanmer, Michael J. and McDonald, Jared. 2020. “At What Cost? Reexamining Audience Costs in Realistic Settings.” Journal of Politics, online.Google Scholar
“Defiant Homeland Security Secretary Defends Family Separations.” NPR, June 18, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/06/18/620972542/we-do-not-have-a-policy-of-separating-families-dhs-secretary-nielsen-says (last accessed July 12, 2020).Google Scholar
Ellis, Richard J. 1994. Presidential Lightning Rods: The Politics of Blame Avoidance. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.Google Scholar
Healy, Andrew and Malhotra, Neil. 2009. “Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy.” American Political Science Review 103(3): 387–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinterleitner, Markus. 2020. Policy Controversies and Political Blame Games. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hood, Christopher and Lodge, Martin. 2006. The politics of public service bargains: Reward, competency, loyalty – and blame. London: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hood, Christopher. 2007. “What happens when transparency meets blame-avoidance?” Public Management Review 9(2): 191–210 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, Oliver, Jilke, Sebastian, Petersen, Carolyn, and Van de Walle, Steven. 2016. “Citizens’ Blame of Politicians for Public Service Failure: Experimental Evidence about Blame Reduction through Delegation and Contracting.” Public Administration Review 76: 83–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maestas, Cherie D., Atkeson, Lonna Rae, Croom, Thomas, and Bryant, Lisa A.. 2008. “Shifting the Blame: Federalism, Media and Public Assignment of Blame Following Hurricane Katrina.” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 38(4): 609–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malle, Bertram F. 2011. “Attribution theories: How people make sense of behavior.” In Theories in social psychology ed. Chadee, D. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 72–95.Google Scholar
Marvel, John D. and Girth, Amanda M.. 2016. “Citizen attributions of blame in third-party governance.” Public Administration Review 76, 96–108.Google Scholar
McDonald, Jared, Croco, Sarah and Turitto, Candace. 2019. “Teflon Don or Politics as Usual? An Examination of Foreign Policy Flip-Flops in the Age of Trump.” The Journal of Politics 81(2): 757–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDonald, Jared. 2020. “Avoiding the Hypothetical: Why ‘Mirror Experiments’ are an Essential Part of Survey Research.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 32(2): 266–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGraw, Kathleen M. 1991. “Managing Blame: An Experimental Test of the Effects of Political Accounts.” American Political Science Review 85(4): 1133–57.Google Scholar
“Nielsen Rejects Criticism on Family Separation.” Associated Press, June 18, 2018. https://apnews.com/39423087c72345babe6f0bd03ea808dc (last accessed July 12, 2020).Google Scholar
Piatak, Jaclyn, Mohr, Zachary, and Leland, Suzanne. 2017. “Bureaucratic accountability in third-party governance: Experimental evidence of blame attribution during times of budgetary crisis.” Public Administration 95(4): 976–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudolph, Thomas J. 2006. “Triangulating Political Responsibility: The Motivated Formation of Responsibility Judgments.” Political Psychology 27(1): 99–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taber, Charles S. and Lodge, Milton. 2006. Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science 50(3): 755–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Latest: Top Dem calls for Kirstjen Nielsen to resign.” Associated Press, July 31, 2018. https://apnews.com/ebe6e8fa8cf946669da0c2cbbb831af5 (accessed July 12, 2020).Google Scholar
Weaver, R. Kent. 1986. “The Politics of Blame Avoidance.” Journal of Public Policy 6(4): 371–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Croco et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QJ9RLJ
Link
Supplementary material: File

Croco et al. supplementary material

Croco et al. supplementary material

Download Croco et al. supplementary material(File)
File 44 KB