While governments increasingly turn to third-party providers to deliver public services and government responsibilities are increasingly shifted from the federal to the state and local levels, both contracting and the division of powers under federalism blur lines of accountability. Because recent experiments on blame shifting find mixed results and citizens have different expectations of federal, state, and local government, we ask the following: How does blame attribution in third-party governance compare across levels of government? To address this question, we employ a timely survey experiment to examine who is responsible for a prisoner’s death in the case of interstate prisoner transport, which is one of the few services that is provided across all levels of government and by government contractors. The results show that contracting reduces the level of blame attributed to the government and that blame for contract failures varies by the level of government. Across levels of government, we find the local government sees the largest reduction in blame by contracting out. Findings have implications for accountability in contracting arrangements in public safety contexts.

尽管政府越来越多地寻求第三方提供者来提供公共服务，并且政府的职责越来越多地从联邦转移到州和地方各级，但联邦制下的合同制和分权制模糊了问责制。由于最近有关责任转移的实验发现结果不一，而且公民对联邦，州和地方政府的期望也不同，因此我们提出以下问题：第三方治理中的责任归属如何在各级政府之间进行比较？为了解决这个问题，我们进行了及时的调查实验，以检查谁负责州际囚犯运输中的囚犯死亡，这是各级政府和政府承包商提供的为数不多的服务之一。结果表明，签约减少了归因于政府的责任级别，而合同失败的责任因政府级别而异。在各级政府中，我们发现通过外包将地方政府的责任减少幅度最大。调查结果对公共安全背景下的合同安排中的责任制有影响。