Sources of Blame Attribution: Citizen Attitudes Towards Public Officials after 9/11

When government fails, whom do citizens blame? The purpose of this study is to explore citizen attitudes regarding blame of intelligence officials for making America vulnerable to the attacks on 9/11. The study used a short Internet-based survey experiment to test whether party cues affect people’s attitudes about the responsibility of three government officials in making America vulnerable to the 9/11 attacks: CIA Director George Tenet, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. The survey was conducted by Knowledge Networks (KN) over the Internet in February 2007, using a nationally representative sample of 1015 American adults. KN recruits panel members over the telephone via random digit dialing (RDD) and provides them with WebTV equipment in exchange for their participation in weekly surveys, which they complete online. All Americans were sampled from the KN panel. Variables for this study can be divided into two general categories: demographic and feelings over 9/11. The feelings variables question the respondent about personal emotion connected to 9/11 and how much blame the respondent places on George Tenet, Louis Freeh, and Alan Greenspan. Finally, respondents were asked about the blame to place on additional federal, state, and local authorities.