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. However, the advancement of multilevel governance poses a challenge for democratic accountability and responsiveness, as 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. 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. 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. Departing from conventional partisanship emphasis, our study introduces the significant role of territorial identity on several public policy issues in education and healthcare, which are important for most citizens and have not been systematically included in the clarity of responsibility literature. Findings demonstrate that individuals with strong connections to subnational territories tend to credit positive policy outcomes to these tiers, while negative evaluations are often attributed to less attached levels of government. The findings are important as they highlight that even in a relatively centralized decision-making context like in Norway, territorial attachment affects responsibility attribution.