Attributions of responsibility are a fundamental component of democratic citizenship. For citizens to control government effectively they must not only be informed about the actions of government officials (Hutchins 2005), but also be able to ascribe credit or blame properly for those actions. Yet as Dennis Thompson (1980, 905) has argued, ‘‘because many different officials contribute in many different ways to decisions and policies of government, it is difficult even in principle to identify who is... responsible for political outcomes.’’ Thompson refers to this complex attribution environment as ‘‘the problem of many hands,’’ and the example of Hurricane Katrina and government’s role in providing disaster relief more generally would seem to be a case in point.
Disaster relief efforts in the U.S. are governed by a series of federal laws that attempt to coordinate the actions of local, state, and, if necessary, federal officials (see Birkland 2008; Schneider 2008). Local governments are granted authority for developing and executing emergency preparedness plans for their communities. In this bottom-up process, local officials and agencies are charged, in a sense, with being the first responders when disaster strikes. ‘‘Higher governmental levels are not supposed to become involved unless local-level resources are exhausted,’’