When government fails, whom do citizens blame? The purpose of this study is to explore citizen attitudes regarding blame of intelligence officials for making America vulnerable to the attacks on 9/11. The study used a short Internet-based survey experiment to test whether party cues affect people’s attitudes about the responsibility of three government officials in making America vulnerable to the 9/11 attacks: CIA Director George Tenet, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. The survey was conducted by Knowledge Networks (KN) over the Internet in February 2007, using a nationally representative sample of 1015 American adults. KN recruits panel members over the telephone via random digit dialing (RDD) and provides them with WebTV equipment in exchange for their participation in weekly surveys, which they complete online.
Neil Malhotra, Alexander Kuo