Accountability and Blame Avoidance After Crises

Policy crises often lead to “framing contests,” in which officeholders, opponents, media, and the public at large aim to interpret the crisis in question, explain its cause, attribute responsibility, and agree on ways to address harm caused. More often than not, these contests turn into blame games for the incumbent officeholder. Formal and informal institutional factors can shape blame avoidance options of officeholders, and influence the outcomes of these crisis-induced blame games in terms of blame escalation, policy responses, and political sanctions. First, formal institutions shape officeholders’ incentives for arguing that they are not responsible for the crisis or should not be punished for its occurrence. Studies in the field of welfare state retrenchment and ministerial resignations have analyzed the blame avoidance options of governments and the survival rates of officeholders in various institutional settings. These studies have provided evidence that institutional complexity and policy-making authority help explaining pathways of blame management. In single-party governments, the accountability chain is more clear and prime ministers have a stronger electoral incentive to sack failing and unpopular ministers. However, a more restrictive interpretation of formal ministerial responsibility for administrative or implementation failures, along with the delegation of policy execution to agencies at arm’s length, can work as a protective shield in blame games for the officeholders and reinforce policy inertia. Consociational systems with multiparty coalitions often show an opposite effect. Second, institutionalized norms, also known as “the way we do things around here,” affect blame avoidance behavior available to officeholders. Studies which have taken “cultural-institutional” approaches to accountability studies have shown that informal accountability actors, fora, and norms about appropriate behavior shape blame processes. Actors in consociational systems with multiparty coalitions often consider consensus-oriented and nonconfrontational behavior, such as attempts to appease the opposition with policy reparations, as more appropriate responses to blame than those in systems with more elite polarization. In addition, officeholders are increasingly held to account by actors who solely have an informal role in blame games, such as the media and interest groups. Therefore, the extent of mediatization and increased polarization plays a major role in how different political contexts “process” blame. Third, other relevant noninstitutional factors for blame avoidance behavior are important, such as the nature and timing of the crisis and involvement of other actors in the blame game. Issue salience and proximity affect the potential for blame escalations and the options for blame management by both office holders and their opponents. Prior reputation of incumbent politicians helps them to draw on leadership capital to deflect blame. If the timing of a blame game coincides with upcoming elections, blame is more likely to escalate and lead to political sanctions. To further understanding of the role of institutional factors in crisis-induced blames games, future research should focus on blame games where institutions themselves are questioned, contested, or in-flux.

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Texans: the Leadership Styles of George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson Chapter 3: The Politics of Blame Avoidance: Presidential Strategies for Surviving the Washington 'Blame Game' Chapter 4: Opening Pandora's Box: Blame Avoidance, 9/11, and the Push for War with Iraq Chapter 5: Opening Pandora's Box: Blame Avoidance During the Iraq War Chapter 6: Bush and Iraq: Revisiting the Vietnam Analogy Bibliography

The blame game, with its finger-pointing and mutual buck-passing, is a familiar feature of politics and organizational life, and blame avoidance pervades government and public organizations at every level. Political and bureaucratic blame games and blame avoidance are more often condemned than analyzed. In The Blame Game , Christopher Hood takes a different approach by showing how blame avoidance shapes the workings of government and public services. Arguing that the blaming phenomenon is not all bad, Hood demonstrates that it can actually help to pin down responsibility, and he examines different kinds of blame avoidance, both positive and negative. Hood traces how the main forms of blame avoidance manifest themselves in presentational and "spin" activity, the architecture of organizations, and the shaping of standard operating routines. He analyzes the scope and limits of blame avoidance, and he considers how it plays out in old and new areas, such as those offered by the digital age of websites and e-mail. Hood assesses the effects of this behavior, from high-level problems of democratic accountability trails going cold to the frustrations of dealing with organizations whose procedures seem to ensure that no one is responsible for anything. Delving into the inner workings of complex institutions, The Blame Game proves how a better understanding of blame avoidance can improve the quality of modern governance, management, and organizational design.

Policymakers often engage in blame avoidance behaviour that affects the ways in which they structure their organisations, adopt policies and operating routines, and present their work to the public. The linguistic aspects of such behaviour have received relatively little academic attention. In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of policy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena. I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated ‘language games’, policy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in policy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.

List of Illustrations vii Preface ix Part One: Blame, Credit, and Trust in Executive Government Chapter One: Credit Claiming, Blame Avoidance, and Negativity Bias 3 Chapter Two: Players in the Blame Game: Inside the World of Blame Avoidance 24 Part Two: Avoiding Blame: Three Basic Strategies Chapter Three: Presentational Strategies: Winning the Argument, Drawing a Line, Changing the Subject, and Keeping a Low Profi le 47 Chapter Four: Agency Strategies: Direct or Delegate, Choose or Inherit? 67 Chapter Five: Policy or Operational Strategies 90 Chapter Six: The Institutional Dynamics of Blameworld: A New Tefl on Era? 112 Part Three: Living in a World of Blame Avoidance Chapter Seven: Mixing and Matching Blame-Avoidance Strategies 135 Chapter Eight: Democracy, Good Governance, and Blame Avoidance 157 Chapter Nine: The Last Word 181 Notes 187 References 201 Index 219

Defining authorities is a topic of current interest in quality management. One of the conditions in the ISO 9000‐series deals with this topic. In this paper we will first examine the concepts of authority and responsibility, which are not at all univocally defined in organization literature. We will pay attention to the distinction between formal and factual authority and to various possible forms of overlap of authorities. We illustrate a management method in the use of convergence of factual to formal authority and responsebility. Finally we pose some questions on the relationship between authority and responsibility to various types of organizations in order to get a first idea to what extent it is desirable or possible to equalize factual and formal authorities.

This chapter analyzes the extent of formal authority as an interactional accomplishment. Focusing on situated language use, we examined a conflict between County Clerk Davis and a couple seeking a marriage license by taking two perspectives: one applying discourse and conversation analyses; the other applying the ventriloquial approach. The chapter reviews literature on formality in interaction, authority, and power before the analysis. In the first section we show how discourse analysis reveals how formal authorities are claimed and contested through the use of pronouns, institutional language, framing, politeness, and actions that make relevant situated interactional roles. Then we show how conversation analysis draws attention to sequential features of the interaction, and how dispreferred and disaligning actions are accomplished turn by turn to constitute the conflicted nature of the encounter. We finish the analysis by discussing the ventriloquial approach—which examines the forms of agency that are incarnated through talk and bring to life sources of authority such as people, documents, and ideas—and how this can distribute and redistribute agency upstream to preceding agents rather than locating it in a particular person acting in the present moment. We end the chapter by discussing these analytic methods and what we learn about varieties of formal authority by applying them.

ABSTRACTModern executive politics is characterised by blame games – offensive and defensive symbolic performances by various individual or collective social actors. In this article, I propose a discursive approach to analysing opposition–government blame games where top politicians try to persuade mass audiences to side with them in disputes over government's culpability by using carefully crafted written texts. Drawing insights and concepts from the tradition of discourse-historical studies into political communication as well as the recent literature on blame avoidance in government, I analyse conflicting opinion pieces published by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the UK in the wake of the global financial crisis that developed since 2007. I present a basic functional argument model of attributing and avoiding blame, reconstruct the competing argumentation schemes that help us interpret public debates over the crisis, and show how blame is attached or deflected using various persuasive discursive devices, such as metaphors, lexical cohesion, and ways of framing and positioning, that underlie particular attacks, justifications, or excuses. In conclusion, I emphasise the importance of looking beyond the formal structure of the arguments to identify the more subtle emotional appeals used in government-related blame games.

Research Highlights and Abstract This article provides the first detailed and evidence-based account of the coalition government's approach to transport-related carbon management. It exposes the existence of a ‘governance vacuum’ between the statutory target and a very weak devolved implementation system (i.e. ‘fuzzy governance’ and ‘fuzzy accountability’). Research in four major city regions reveals a systemic switch from an emphasis on carbon management and reduction towards economic growth and job creation. Officials within the policy design and delivery chain emphasise the manner in which the demands of democratic politics tend to frustrate meaningful policy change. A general demand by actors at the local level not for the discretions delivered by localism but for a more robust and centrally managed—even statutory—governance framework. The Climate Change Act 2008 received global acclaim for embedding an ambitious set of targets for the reduction of carbon emissions in legislation. This article explores the policies and institutional frameworks in place to deliver transport-related carbon reductions as part of the subsequent Carbon Plan. A detailed methodology involving institutional mapping, interviews and focus groups combined with a theoretical approach that combines the theory of multi-level governance with the literature on ‘blame avoidance’ serves to reveal a complex system of ‘fuzzy governance’ and ‘fuzzy accountability’. Put simply, it reveals there are no practical sub-national implementation levers for achieving the statutory targets. Apart from symbolic or rhetorical commitments, the emphasis of policy-makers at all levels in the delivery chain has switched from carbon management and reduction to economic growth and job creation. This raises fresh research questions about the pathologies of democratic competition and future responses to the climate change challenge.

The Latin American "Turn to the Left" consisted in either the consolidation of traditional left-of-centre parties or the emergence of new anti-neoliberal populist projects that decisively shaped the respective national party systems in reaction to major neoliberal crises. Some Southern European countries similarly experienced the rise of new populist parties (Podemos, Syriza and the Five Star Movement) while in Portugal we witnessed the consolidation of the existing left-of-centre parties. This article proposes a middle-range theory to give a cross-regional account of the eventual emergence of different anti-neoliberal populist parties in the aftermath of a neoliberal economic crisis. The argument focuses on the heterogeneity of such an 'Anti-Neoliberal Populism' category, by looking at the party organisation and the relationship with the unions and with the anti-austerity social movements. The framework thus proposes four different categories of "successful political projects" emerged in the aftermath of the crisis: a "Labour-based Left" (in Uruguay and Portugal); a "party-rooted populism" (in Argentina and Greece); a "movement (based) populism" (in Bolivia and Spain); and a "leader-initiated populism" (in Venezuela and Italy).

Center–regional relations in Putin’s Russia are marked by strict hierarchies, with regional governors serving as agents to the principal–the federal center. This (authoritarian) mode of federalism allows the federal center to maintain the president’s popularity, by shifting blame for policy failures from the presidency onto other federal political institutions and the regions. The article investigates how the regime reacted to the full-scale warfare against Ukraine. It theoretically elaborates on strategies of blame avoidance in personalist and federal autocracies and applies this framework to the Russian case. Using data from official documents and media reports, it demonstrates that the federal center again resorted to vertical blame-shifting, by formally and informally assigning the regional governors with several unpopular tasks, above all – casualty reporting and mobilization. The war confirmed center–regional relations as a practical venue for blame avoidance, which helps Putin’s regime overcome crises, contributing to its coping resilience.

Credit claiming led in Czechia during the first wave to centralization and during the summer to decentralization. During the second wave, blame-avoidance led again to centralization. First Wave: Similar to other Central and Eastern European countries, Czechia's number of cases and deaths per capita during the first wave were some of the lowest in Europe. The Czech Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš (of the centrist populist ANO) was in a good position to take credit for these results. While this level of centralization of power attracted some criticism, the unprecedented context as well as the undeniable results of the timely intervention translated into genuine political credit. The government's measures enjoyed overwhelming popular support: an April survey found 76% of respondents saw them as “adequate” (and 16% as too lenient). Summer: The Czech government relaxed measures relatively quickly, precipitated by judicial challenges to the procedural aspects of lockdown measures. Thanks to the low prevalence of COVID-19 in the country, rapid reopening did not lead to dramatic increases in infections. Between June and September, there were virtually no restrictions in Czechia. Second wave: In September, the PM admitted the extent to which restrictions had been eased during the summer was a mistake, but explained his decisions by “societal demand” and prioritizing the economy. Explicit blame avoidance strategy through decentralization of responsibility between governments came only one year into the pandemic. The government obliged and, unconstitutionally, declared a new state of emergency (24). In one weekend, a year after total centralization of responsibility for the pandemic, regional governors (mostly belonging to opposition parties) were co-opted into the government's blame game that crossed party lines, ahead of the October 2021 parliamentary elections.

The Great Recession: Some Niebuhrian Reflections

Internet auctions demonstrate that advances in information technologies can create more efficient venues of exchange between large numbers of traders. However, the growth of Internet auctions has been accompanied by a corresponding growth in Internet auction fraud. Much extant research on Internet auction fraud in the information systems literature is conducted at the individual level of analysis, thereby limiting its focus to the choices of individual traders or trading dyads. The criminology literature, in contrast, recognizes that social and community factors are equally important influences on the perpetration and prevention of crime. We employ social disorganization theory as a lens to explain how online auction communities address auction fraud and how those communities interact with formal authorities. We show how communities may defy, coexist, or cooperate with the formal authority of auction houses. These observations are supported by a qualitative analysis of three cases of online anticrime communities operating in different auction product categories. Our analysis extends aspects of social disorganization theory to online communities. We conclude that community-based clan control may operate in concert with authority-based formal control to manage the problem of Internet auction fraud more effectively.

Internet auctions demonstrate that advances in information technologies can create more efficient venues of exchange between large numbers of traders. However, the growth of Internet auctions has been accompanied by a corresponding growth in Internet auction fraud. Much extant research on Internet auction fraud in the information systems literature is conducted at the individual level of analysis, thereby limiting its focus to the choices of individual traders or trading dyads. The criminology literature, in contrast, recognizes that social and community factors are equally important influences on the perpetration and prevention of crime. We employ social disorganization theory as a lens to explain how online auction communities address auction fraud and how those communities interact with formal authorities. We show how communities may defy, coexist, or cooperate with the formal authority of auction houses. These observations are supported by a qualitative analysis of three cases of online anticrime communities operating in different auction product categories. Our analysis extends aspects of social disorganization theory to online communities. We conclude that community-based clan control may operate in concert with authority-based formal control to manage the problem of Internet auction fraud more effectively.