A potentially important but under-researched reason for politicians to delegate the delivery of tax-funded public services through contracting out is to shift blame, defined as citizens’ allocation of responsibility and blame for unfavourable outcomes. We conduct experiments to assess the consequences of contracting for citizens’ judgements of local politicians’ responsibility and blame for a failing local street maintenance. We give citizens realistic, hypothetical scenarios in the form of pictures of poor quality streets followed by information provided on a hypothetical local government website about organisation of service provision combined with, randomly allocated, cues about local politicians’ delegation through contracting for the delivery of this service. The four cues, which reflect different forms of typical information about service delivery structures found on local government websites and in media reports of service failures, are: no information about responsibility for delivery; delivery without formal delegation entailing elected politicians’ direct involvement managing implementation within a publicly-owned organisation; delivery with delegation by politicians through a contract to a unit within the publicly-owned organisation; and delivery with delegation by politicians through a contract to a privately-owned, for-profit, company. We hypothesise that delegation reduces citizens’ perceptions of politicians’ responsibility for poor service outcomes and reduces blame relative to no information about provision with delegation beyond the public organisation by contract shifting more responsibility than delegation by contract within the organisation. Delivery without formal delegation and elected politicians’ direct involvement increases citizens’ attribution of responsibility and blame to the local politicians. The control group of no provision of information cues enables us to test the hypotheses that explicit mention of no formal delegation will increase citizens’ assessments of responsibility and blame mention of delegation will decrease citizens’ assessments of responsibility and blame relative to this benchmark. The experiment is being conducted in the Netherlands and in the UK, with two online panels of 1000 citizens representative of the broader populations of each country. The full results of the fieldwork and analysis will be available in summer 2014.