Democratic Accountability with Citizen Coproduction

Many policies require citizens to actively participate in their implementation in order to be successful, a situation referred to as citizen coproduction. Though citizen coproduction is necessary in many policy areas, it could create difficulties for democratic accountability because citizens and politicians share responsibility for policy failures and attribution of blame may be difficult. We analyze the problem of democratic accountability with citizen coproduction in the context of a model in which politicians, who vary with respect to their competence at selecting policies, choose whether to implement policies whose success depends on citizen coproduction choices. For citizens, the problem is one of attribution: when coproduction is low, it may be hard to select good incumbents because policy failures are frequent even when policy choices are good. Incumbents anticipate these effects, which sometimes implies that they are less likely to choose reforms when they are more likely to be successful.