Understanding public blame attributions when private contractors are responsible for civilian casualties
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Understanding public blame attributions when private contractors are responsible for civilian casualties Mark D. Ramirez1 Accepted: 28 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract When the actions of private military contractors result in civilian casualties during war, who do citizens blame? This study argues blame attributions can be shaped by people’s inferences about the motivation of actors operating on behalf of the government. Using national survey data, this study randomizes whether casualties are the result of state military forces or private military forces contracted by the government. The results show that inferences about the motivation of state military forces insulate both military personnel and public officials from blame, while inferences about the motivation of private contractors disperse blame onto contractor personnel and the government. The results provide new theoretical insight into how citizens evaluate government performance and the potential drawbacks of utilizing private contractors to achieve public policy objectives. Keywords Blame · Attributions · Motives · Private military contractors
Introduction The outsourcing of a number of government functions traditionally carried out by local or federal governments, commonly known as “privatization,” has blurred the lines between public and private service. This raises important questions about who citizens blame when the implementation of public policy by for-profit agents working at the behest of official state actors goes awry. In one of the most egregious cases of policy drift by a private contractor, private military contractors (PMCs) employed by Blackwater Security Company murdered 17 Iraqi civilians, wounding 20 more, while escorting a US embassy convoy. The Blackwater case was not an isolated incident. In May of 2005, Blackwater contractors shot at a civilian vehicle killing the driver and wounding his wife and daughter. In 2006, contractors for Danubia Global murdered three civilians in Falluja. In 2015, military
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1107 7-020-09404-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Mark D. Ramirez [email protected] 1
The School of Politics and Global Studies and Director of the MA Program in Political Psychology, Arizona State University, 975 S. Myrtle, Coor Hall, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
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contractors working for Unity Resources Group killed two unarmed civilian women as they approached their convoy.1 In order to better understand the degree and mechanisms of accountability in such situations, this research examines who the public blames when PMCs, working at the behest of the US government, are responsible for civilian casualties. Despite long-standing international norms against using non-state actors in conflicts, many states are relying on PMCs to achieve their foreign policy goals (Krahmann 2010; Singer 2008). Th
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