Is Responsibility Intuitive in a Public Encounter?

Abstract

A public encounter is a direct, focused interaction between unelected public officials and private individuals with the goal of enacting a distribution of benefits or obligations. Administrative responsibility concerns an official's normative obligations for acting within a legally defined role. Does the public perceive notionally responsible action in a public encounter as actually responsible? Our mixed-method approach to this question begins by theoretically connecting two practical problems with specific principles of “good” public administration. We transform these problems into hypothetical scenarios supported by theory and local law, and then present them as vignettes in a randomized online survey experiment to 1100 respondents in the United Kingdom. We find that responsibility is clearly intuitive to participants, and that their arguments about the principles underlying responsibility seem to be clarified, rather than made more sophisticated or complex, by the public encounters they observe.