Bureaucrats absorb blame for system-level failures they did not decide.
Evidence
Street-level bureaucrats mediate between citizens and the state in that clients’ inability to obtain benefits or services and inequities of distribution may be understood by clients as personal malfeasance of street-level bureaucrats or administrative agency disarray. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1325
Categorization
- XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s mechanism: this is how the discretionary layer reroutes citizen grievance away from political causes. — connects to: Institutions shield upper echelons from accountability by deflecting blame to subordinate causes. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 549; Institutional scandals are reframed as isolated individual failures to deflect systemic blame.; Bureaucratic compartmentalization structurally enables individuals to evade responsibility for harm. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 567 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- Bureaucratic delegation lets officials feel responsibility ends at passing evidence upward.
#expands(0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 501 - Institutional scandals are reframed as isolated individual failures to deflect systemic blame.
#exemplifies(0.80) - Bureaucratic compartmentalization structurally enables individuals to evade responsibility for harm.
#corroborates(0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 567 - Institutions shield upper echelons from accountability by deflecting blame to subordinate causes.
#corroborates(0.78) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 549 - The bad-apples framing deflects blame from systemic causes
#exemplifies(0.78) - Bureaucratic power shifts guilt from wrongdoer to victim
#expands(0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2442 - Displacing blame onto underfunded regulators enables industries to deny responsibility.
#qualifies(0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1102 - Bureaucratic reorganization can mask continuing obstruction of accountability
#complicates(0.74) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 526