In this article, we exploit a between-subjects survey experiment fielded among local politicians in Norway (N=1073) to study how politicians distribute blame and credit among relevant stakeholders within a policy field. This is an important question since credit claiming and blame avoidance strategies affect politicians’ legitimacy and perceived integrity, and thus are tied closely to the accountability of politicians for their actions. We find that both government and opposition politicians disallow local political responsibility for outcomes in a policy field (i.e. primary education) where they control the organization of service provision. Instead, school personnel and parents receive most of the credit (blame) for good (poor) performance. We also show that local politicians are keen to shift blame onto higher levels of government, but do not engage in government-opposition blame games at the local level. Taken together, our findings suggest that vertical blame shifting prevails over majority-opposition blame games in settings characterized by a political consensus culture.