Territorial attachment and attribution of responsibility: Who blames which government in multilevel contexts?

Subnational authority is rising across the globe, and the number of tasks and competences for which local and regional governments are responsible for have significantly increased (Hooghe et al., 2016; Ladner et al., 2019). However, the advancement of multilevel governance poses a challenge for democratic accountability and responsiveness. First and foremost, citizens may find it difficult to disentangle which tier of government is responsible for a policy. Furthermore, different types of citizens may attribute the responsibility to different tiers of governments. For example, previous research reveals that partisans of the national incumbent tend to assign responsibility to regional governments in federal countries when they believe the economic situation is poor (León et al., 2018). In this paper, we argue that the extent to which citizens hold local, regional, and national government accountable for policy performance depends on their attachments to the various tiers. Positive policy performance evaluations are attributed to the tiers to which a respondent is strongly attached, whereas negative evaluations are attributed to tiers to which a respondent feels less attached. We explore the role of territorial identity on public policy evaluations and responsibility attributions of citizens in Norway, a decentralised unitary country, using survey data that includes over 2,000 respondents, which was collected in November 2022 (Norwegian Citizen Panel Wave 25). Our contributions are threefold. First, we asked the respondents to evaluate the quality of a number of public policies in education and healthcare, which are important for the majority of citizens and have not been systematically included in the clarity of responsibility literature. Second, we questioned them directly about which tier of government bears the responsibility for their evaluation. Finally, we show that, in addition to partisanship, local and regional identity also play a role in citizens’ evaluation of the quality of public policy provision. Our findings reveal that those who have a stronger connection to the subnational territory they live in (municipality and/or county) tend to attribute the responsibility to the respective subnational government if they had positively evaluated the policy performance. On the other hand, those who evaluated the policy performance negatively are more likely to attribute the responsibility to the level they feel less attached to. The findings are important as they highlight that even in a relatively centralised decision-making context like in Norway, territorial attachment affects responsibility attribution.