A Formal Model of Social Blame in Political Context

Abstract

This study relies on existing empirical works in psychology, political science, and behavioral economics to construct a formal model of political blame attribution that captures how individual blame attribution is aggregate into social blaming of sets of agents. Such a framework facilitates an analysis of the mechanisms by which social and political conditions alter the intensity, direction, and distributions of blame attributions. At the second stage of the study we utilize the model to explore the implication of two central macro-level constructs – institutional design and social cleavages – on the way social blame is shaped. For this purpose we introduce two new concepts: blame coherence and blame agreement, and provide formal measures for these concepts. Next, we offer a typology which relates institutional design and social characteristics to the formation of collective blame. Finally, we corroborate the model’s predictions based on the results of existing empirical studies.