Blame and Accountability in Authoritarian Regimes

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How and when are government officials in authoritarian regimes credited or blamed for their actions? The ability to correctly assign responsibility for policies to the government officials responsible for them is a crucial component of most models of political accountability in political science. In purely democratic settings, correctly assigning responsibility is critical to allowing voters to punish (or reward) politicians and to incentivize them to follow the will of their constituencies. In autocratic or bureaucratic settings, assigning responsibility is crucial to insuring that appointed government officials prioritize the needs of their principles – whether elected officials or autocratic leaders – over their own utility. Much of the existing work on blame attribution has focused on democratic settings, outlining a number of potential factors – information asymmetries, biased sources of information, opaque policy processes, overlap between formal responsibilities, etc. – that problematize the process. Less is known, however, about the process of blame attribution in authoritarian regimes. On the one hand, authoritarian leaders may have difficulties assigning blame for policy on others due to their authority and limited accountability, even as taking credit for others’ work is simpler. On the other hand, authoritarian regimes have unique opportunities to manipulate the policy process and information flows in order to diffuse blame away from leaders and towards lower level officials without compromising their policy goals.

The contributions in this panel seek to focus attention on the ways in which credit and blame for policy making is assigned to officials in authoritarian regimes by both the populace and top-level leaders. The Syunyaev and Borisova et al. papers focus attention on micro-level blame attribution, exploring how and when the populace is able to distinguish between different levels of government in authoritarian settings and assign responsibility for policy to them. The Sharafutdinova et al. paper builds on this to explore the consequences of blame attribution for electoral outcomes, specifically examining whether officials can strategically shape perceptions of their responsiveness using digital tools in order to take credit for public goods provision. Finally, the Remington and Yakovlev paper examines the selection and reappointment process for sub-national executives in authoritarian regimes, calling attention to the conditions under which authoritarian leaders can correctly assign credit or blame to officials for pursuing regime priorities. In exploring these issues, the papers in this panel apply novel data and analytical tools to the problem, encompassing a wide range of approaches that harness contemporary advances in experimental work, public opinion research and survey design, exploitation of natural experiments, and big data. Taken together, the panel affirms the difficulty of assigning responsibility for policy outcomes in settings where officials have overlapping responsibility and the authorities can manipulate information environments. However, the collective findings also call attention to the ways in which officials in authoritarian regimes have unique opportunities to strategically manipulate policy processes in order to shape popular perceptions of outcomes and shift perceived responsibility. While authoritarian leaders can take advantage of this dynamic to shore up support for themselves and the regime, lower level officials can also avail themselves of these tools to benefit themselves at the expense of overall regime stability. Consequently, the panel has important implications beyond the literature on blame attribution and offers insights to the broader literatures on authoritarian regime stability and policymaking in authoritarian regimes.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Chair

• Ora John Reuter University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Discussants

• Bryn Rosenfeld Cornell University

• Quintin H. Beazer Florida State University

Individual Presentations

• Public Attribution of Responsibility in Autocracies: Evidence from Russia - Georgiy Syunyaev, WZB Berlin Social Science Center

• The Popular Logic of Authoritarian Policymaking: Blame and Attribution in Russia - Ekaterina Borisova, National Research University Higher School of Economics; Israel Marques, National Research University - Higher School of Economics; Regina A. Smyth, Indiana University; Alexei V Zakharov, Higher School of Economics

• Pothole Politics in Moscow - Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, King's College London

• Career Management Strategies for Regional Executives in Russia and China - Andrei Yakovlev, Institute for Industrial and Market Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics; Thomas F. Remington, Emory University