Administrative breakdown: Causal attributions in governmental investigative commission reports

This dissertation compares governmental investigative commission reports about disasters across two national cultures to assess explanations for changes in the evaluation of administrative failures. A review of selected commission reports from Norway and the United States suggests that a pattern of blaming individuals for disasters has over time been replaced by a tendency toward faulting organizational systems. A central question is whether this trend is related to changes in the character of the investigated events or to changes in the conceptual framework used by commission members. The research examines three alternative explanations for the adoption of the system view: (1) changes in the professional composition of commissions, (2) the emergence of modern public administration theory, and (3) the dominant political culture at the time. Propositions drawn from general systems theory, cultural theory, and attribution theory are applied to the commission reports. Data for the dissertation consists of sixty-four commission reports produced by the governments of Norway and the United States. Characteristics of the commissions, their members, and findings the categorized and examined using univariate and bivariate analysis. The analysis of American reports shows that attributing administrative failure to system errors became prominent at the beginning of the twentieth century concurrent with the influence of the Progressive movement in politics as well as the emergence of public administration as a subdiscipline of political science. The maintenance of the system view in commission reports of the modern era is shown to be related to the professional composition of the commissions. The analysis shows that in Norway the trend toward system blame manifested itself much later in this century with a reduction of the influence of lawyers and the inclusion of other professions as investigative commission members from the 1960s and onward. The work of investigative commissions reflects the ambiguities in the administration of complex societies. The current emphasis on system blame weakens elementary principles of personal and political accountability. Instead modern investigative commissions primarily serve as policy evaluators and initiators of system change.