Dolce far niente? Non-compliance and blame avoidance in the EU

Abstract

The politicisation of the EU renders blame avoidance for unpopular EU policies an essential task for governments. This article looks at one particular blame avoidance strategy, which governments have at their disposal in the EU policy process: the threat of non-compliance. In order to gauge its effectiveness, we present two competing arguments. According to the blame avoidance hypothesis, non-compliance enables governments to shift responsibility for unpopular policies to the EU, because the public lacks knowledge about EU policy-making. Conversely, the blame attraction hypothesis posits that threats of non-compliance will backfire and blame will stick with the government, because non-compliance mobilises constituents favouring compliance with EU rules. We test these hypotheses by analysing blame attributions in the news media covering the Italian government’s threat not to comply with the EU budget provisions in 2018. The findings support the blame attraction hypothesis, suggesting that domestic compliance constituents can impede governments’ blame-shifting attempts.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1909938 .

KEYWORDS :

• Blame avoidance
• non-compliance
• European Union
• responsibility attribution
• compliance constituents

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers, the editors, as well as the participants of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Virtual General Conference 2020 and the 6^th Conference of the Section ‘International Relations’ of the German Association for Political Science (DVPW) for their constructive comments. We are specifically grateful to Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, Christian Rauh and Andrea Ceron for their valuable input. We also would like to thank Josef Lolacher, Severin Süß, and Simon Zemp for excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For the purpose of this article, we treat threats of non-compliance and acts of non-compliance as analytically equivalent, since both are blame avoidance strategies: When governments send publicly costly signals that threaten non-compliance and when they publicly refuse to implement EU policies, they engage blame avoidance behaviour.

2 PRAs are statements in which a (i) sender assigns responsibility for (ii) a (actual or prospective) policy outcome to (iii) a target in the mass media public. For the purpose of this article, we are interested only in negative PRAs. Therefore, we use the terms (negative) responsibility attribution and blame attribution interchangeably.

3 As boundedly rational actors, governments choose strategies they believe to minimize blame for their actions. However, the complexity and opacity of politics (Pierson 2000) affect policy-makers’ ability to predict the success of blame avoidance strategies, which may well lead to unintended outcomes. Specifically, the complexity and opacity of EU policy-making make the success of blame shifting to the EU ambiguous.

4 Using newspaper articles as a data source comes with the additional advantage of providing us with a continuous measure of responsibility attributions over time. By contrast, parliamentary debates on particular EU policies are rare and often take place after enforcement, thus providing an incomplete snapshot perspective.

5 A dataset containing all 360 coded statements can be found at https://doi.org/10.5282/ubm/data.229.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) [Grant No. 391007015].

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) [Grant No. 391007015].

Notes on contributors

Lisa Kriegmair

Lisa Kriegmair is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science, LMU Munich. Her research focuses on credit conditionality and the politics of blame avoidance and has appeared, inter alia, in the Journal of European Public Policy and Politics & Governance. [[email protected]]

Berthold Rittberger

Berthold Rittberger is Professor of International Relations, LMU Munich. He specialises in EU integration, regulation and the design and effects of political institutions. His most recent book is Integration and Differentiation in the European Union – Theory and Policies (together with Dirk Leuffen and Frank Schimmelfennig, Palgrave, 2021). [[email protected]-muenchen.de]

Bernhard Zangl

Bernhard Zangl is Professor of Global Governance, LMU Munich. He specialises in international institutions, indirect governance, international blame games and global power shifts. His most recent book is The Governor’s Dilemma: Indirect Governance Beyond Principals and Agents (edited together with Kenneth Abbott, Philipp Genschel, and Duncan Snidal, Oxford University Press, 2020). [[email protected]]

Tim Heinkelmann-Wild

Tim Heinkelmann-Wild is a researcher and doctoral candidate at LMU Munich. He is interested, inter alia, in the causes and consequences of the contestation of multilateral institutions. His research on international blame games, wedge issues and institutional resilience has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Governance, the European Political Science Review, as well as Politics and Governance, among others. [[email protected]]