In addition, the statistical analyses of the formation of responsibility perception
hypotheses revealed that citizens’ perception of which level of government is responsible for
which government functions reveals that citizens’ responsibility perception is informed by their
level of political sophistication. The more sophisticated or the more informed the citizens, the
more they are to form a correct responsibility perception among multi-level governments.
Certainly, this finding shines light onto the importance of the decentralization implementation
plan that focuses on promoting citizens’ awareness of how decentralization works in the country.
Failure to incorporate this ‘awareness promotion’ plan may result in the struggle of the
implementation of decentralization. Put simply, it can be inferred that the struggles many
countries are facing could be traced back to flaws in the design of their implementation plan that
focused solely on macro-level concerns such as the planning and designing of fiscal
decentralization or the planning of governmental responsibility shifting, but pay no attention to
micro-level concerns such as citizens’ understanding of what different orders of government do.