Blame where it is Due? – The Impact of Responsibility Judgments on the Performance-Trust Link at the Local Level

Over the past decades, national governments of advanced Western democracies have allocated responsibilities for many policies to local and transnational levels of governance. The multilevel governance structures render it increasingly difficult for the electorate to distinguish which level of government is responsible for certain policies. This growing complexity of the responsibility structure may have substantial consequences for the so called “policy feedback loop”. Literature on the policy feedback loop assumes that citizen’s support for the democratic regime and its institutions is partially affected by their evaluations of the policies they implemented. Recent studies, for instance, show that welfare performance is significantly related to levels of political support (Kumlin 2011, Hobolt & Tilley 2014). A limitation of almost all policy feedback literature is the inability of breaking down the causal mechanisms at the individual level. This paper takes a first step in opening the causal black box by analyzing the influence of perceptions of responsibility on the evaluation-support linkage. To what extent do citizens hold governments at various levels (local, national, transnational) accountable for performance on a range of policy fields? And, more importantly, how does this assignment of responsibility influence the feedback loop from evaluations of those policies to government support? Following Easton (1965, 1975), we define political support for an object as specific to the extent that it is dependent upon perceptions (evaluations) of its own performance, and as diffuse to the extent that it is not. Following Norris (2011), we investigate three sets of objects, namely identity (feelings of attachment), regime performance (‘satisfaction with the way democracy works’) and institutions (political trust), each at three levels of government (local, national, and European). This paper relies on data from the first Dutch Local Election Study, held in March 2016 among a representative sample of the Netherlands. Multilevel regression is employed to test the conditional effect of responsibility judgments on the relationship between performance evaluation and political support.