Agency Design, the Mass Media, and the Blame for Agency Scandals

Government agencies are responsible for the regulation and enforcement of laws that affect nearly every aspect of society. Their responsibilities range from the implementation of major health care and financial reform to the criminal enforcement of antitrust laws and the collection of taxes. Yet democratic institutions rarely provide a direct electoral check on bureaucrats. Political accountability of agencies thus requires that voters credit or blame elected officials with formal authority over those agencies. The process by which voters learn which elected officials are responsible for an agency is complicated by institutional structures that feature multiple political principals, layers of bureaucracy, and complicated decision-making procedures often hidden from public view. A large body of research has thus focused on institutional design features that enhance the clarity of responsibility for agency actions (e.g., Kagan 2001). However, even with this research, we know little about how these features moderate voter attribution of blame. Are responsibility attributions for agency actions influenced by the institutional clarity of responsibility? Proper allocation of blame and credit is necessary for democratic governance. Voters learn who is responsible for an action, form judgments about their performance in office, and then vote according to those judgments (Fiorina 1981; Key 1966). Concerns about the proper allocation of blame motivates many scholars to advocate for more presidential control over agencies. However, in order for increased presidential formal authority to enhance political accountability, voters must actually know that the president wields that authority. How do voters learn about the complex institutional details concerning government agencies? As scholars have argued in the context of legislative institutions, voters learn about the institutional context through the mass media (Rudolph 2003). Unlike lawmaking, which has tallied roll-call votes and often a formal signing statement given by the president, most agency policy making occurs in a black box (Kagan 2001). Citizens, without media coverage, are unlikely to know which elected officials or bureaucrats are responsible for agency policy making or performance. The informational role of the media has been shown to enable accountability by increasing voter knowledge of elected officials, which, in turn, creates incentives for those officials to be more responsive to their constituents (Prat and Stromberg 2011; Snyder and Stromberg 2010). In American politics, mass media provides voters with much information about political institutions and officials such as congressional actions (Arnold 2004) and the president's public agenda (Barabas 2008). The media also serves Congress and voters as a crucial watchdog over the actions of government agencies (Rosen 1998). One challenge facing observational studies seeking to identify the influence of agency institutional context on responsibility attributions is controlling and measuring the information that voters encounter in the news. In this article, I use a survey experiment to identify the effect of agency design information on attributions of responsibility for an agency scandal. The survey experiment allows me to manipulate the information that respondents receive about agency design, while holding constant other potentially confounding details about the agency. In the experiment, respondents read a real newspaper article about an agency scandal. Scandals provide an opportunity to study one of mass media's most important functions--revealing government malfeasance to citizens. Officials themselves are unlikely to provide information to the public about misdoings in government. Absent these disclosures of wrongdoing, the mass media is the public's only source of information concerning officials who are not representing their interests (Snyder and Puglisi 2011). …