A broken public service rarely involves only one organisation.
A municipality may fund the service. Officials administer it. A separate public entity may operate it. A private contractor may maintain equipment or carry out the work.
When everything functions, those distinctions barely matter to the person using the service.
When something fails, they suddenly matter a great deal.
New research suggests that the way governments divide responsibility between organisations can influence who citizens ultimately blame, and whether they accept a politician’s attempt to shift responsibility elsewhere.
Researchers created a public-service failure
The study, published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, involved 955 people in the United Kingdom.
Participants were presented with a hypothetical failure in a local public service.
Researchers then varied three things: whether the organisation delivering the service was public or private, how extensively responsibility had been delegated to it, and how the elected official responded after the failure.
Some officials accepted responsibility.
Others blamed the organisation responsible for delivering the service.
This allowed the researcher to test something that ordinary political scandals make difficult to isolate: whether people dislike blame shifting itself, or whether their reaction depends on who they believe was actually responsible.
Accepting responsibility was usually safer
The first result was relatively straightforward.
Citizens generally preferred elected officials who accepted responsibility to those who attempted to move the blame onto somebody else.
This supports earlier research suggesting that blame shifting can be a risky political strategy.
An official who immediately points towards a contractor, department or public entity can appear to be avoiding the responsibility that comes with holding office.
But the new experiment found an important exception.
Blame shifting became more acceptable when participants believed the organisation being blamed genuinely carried more responsibility for what had gone wrong.
That means citizens were not rejecting blame shifting automatically.
They were judging whether the blame appeared deserved.
Delegation changed how responsibility was understood
This is where organisational design entered the picture.
When greater responsibility for the service had been delegated to the delivery organisation, participants became more likely to view that organisation as responsible for the failure.
The level of delegation did not directly make blame shifting more popular.
Instead, it changed the mental calculation underneath it.
People first formed a view about who had control.
That view then influenced whether they considered the politician justified in blaming somebody else.
The distinction matters because governments increasingly deliver services through complicated networks rather than a single visible department.
Responsibility can move down an organisational chain.
Political accountability does not necessarily move with it.
A contract does not erase political responsibility
The study highlights a difficult governance problem.
Delegation can be entirely sensible.
Governments may use specialist agencies, public entities or outside suppliers because those organisations possess expertise, infrastructure or capacity that the political office itself does not.
But elected officials remain responsible for deciding how the system is designed.
They may choose the provider, approve the contract, determine how performance is monitored or decide whether poor performance carries consequences.
Citizens can therefore reasonably believe two things at once.
A contractor may have caused the immediate failure.
Government may still be responsible for the system that allowed the failure to happen.
The study found that participants continued to attach role-based responsibility to elected officials even where delivery had been delegated elsewhere.
South Africa’s municipalities show why the distinction matters
The issue has obvious relevance in South African local government, although the UK experiment should not be treated as evidence about South African voters.
The Auditor-General’s latest municipal findings show how complicated accountability around service delivery can become.
In the 2024/25 financial year, South Africa’s metros and their municipal entities were responsible for services to around 8.9 million households and managed roughly R336 billion in expenditure.
None of the metros achieved a clean audit.
The Auditor-General also reported material compliance findings across all metros, with procurement and contract-management failures accounting for 77% of the R73.87 billion in irregular expenditure accumulated over the four-year municipal administration.
Those figures do not mean contractors caused South Africa’s municipal failures.
They show why accountability becomes difficult when public money, political responsibility, administrative control and external service arrangements intersect.
A councillor can blame an implementing organisation.
An implementing organisation can point towards procurement rules or municipal officials.
Officials can point towards contractors.
By the time responsibility has moved through the entire chain, the resident may still have no water, electricity or working infrastructure.
Governance needs responsibility before failure happens
South Africa’s current municipal reform efforts increasingly recognise this problem.
In July 2026, the Auditor-General and Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs launched the AGSA–COGTA 10×10 Forum, intended to move municipal oversight beyond simply identifying failures towards coordinated interventions and clearer accountability.
Its priorities include eliminating unfunded budgets, improving financial-statement submission, reducing adverse audit outcomes and strengthening internal municipal capacity.
That approach reflects an important governance principle.
Accountability works better when responsibility is clear before a crisis begins.
If several organisations are involved in delivering a service, the governance framework should establish who controls which decisions, who monitors performance, who intervenes when standards deteriorate and who remains answerable to the public.
Otherwise, organisational complexity can become political cover.
The experiment cannot recreate a real service crisis
There are important limitations.
Participants responded to a hypothetical waste-collection failure rather than experiencing a real breakdown in a service they depended on.
The study was also conducted in the United Kingdom.
South African residents may respond differently because political institutions, municipal structures, trust levels and experiences of service delivery differ considerably.
The researcher also found only indirect evidence that delegation makes blame shifting more effective.
Greater delegation changed who participants considered culpable, and those perceptions subsequently influenced their response to blame shifting. Delegation itself did not directly make the tactic successful.
That qualification is important.
The study does not show that politicians can avoid accountability simply by outsourcing a service.
In many cases, attempting to do so may still backfire.
Citizens appear to understand more than the blame game assumes
Governance discussions sometimes treat the public as though people assign responsibility in a simple way.
A service failed.
The politician in charge gets blamed.
The new research suggests citizens can make a more complicated judgment.
They consider who had control, who should have prevented the failure and whether the person being blamed actually deserves it.
That creates a useful warning for public institutions.
Delegating a service can transfer operational responsibility.
It cannot automatically transfer accountability.
And when something eventually goes wrong, the most credible response may depend less on finding somebody else to blame than on whether the public believes that person truly had the power to prevent it.
Source Information
Study Title: Judging the blame game: how do citizens react to blame shifting in public service delivery?
Author: Oscar Nowlan
Journal: Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Published Online: 9 January 2026
DOI: 10.1093/jopart/muaf038
