Who Should Solve Social Problems? A Framework of Comparative Responsibility Attributions

From climate mitigation to pandemic control and poverty reduction, public debates centre on who should take action, whether governments, businesses, or citizens. Existing work maps the drivers of responsibility attribution to specific actors, but often treats these judgements as separate. We argue that responsibility judgements are often comparative, such that expectations for one actor are shaped by what people think other actors can and should do. We propose two dimensions that structure these comparisons. The first captures whether actors are seen as able to act on their own (independent) or as reliant on others to act (interdependent). The second captures whether assigning responsibility to one actor is seen as reducing what is expected of others (zero-sum) or increasing what is expected of them (positive-sum). These dimensions explain when responsibility assigned to one actor is expected to lead others to step back versus step in, and when action is expected to be sequential versus simultaneous.