Blame avoidance in hard times: complex governance structures and the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article investigates how governments shift blame during large-scale, prolonged crises. While existing research shows that governments can effectively diffuse blame through ‘fuzzy’ governance structures, less is known about blame diffusion patterns during severe crises when citizens widely expect governments to assume leadership. The article develops expectations on how blame diffusion patterns – consisting of blame-shifting onto lower-level government units, citizens and experts – look and differ in fuzzy governance structures (the political courant normal) and in consolidated governance structures (when governments are called on to consolidate responsibility). The article then tests this theoretical argument with a within-unit longitudinal study of the blame diffusion patterns employed by the Swiss Federal Council (FC) during press conferences held during the COVID-19 pandemic. The period under analysis (March–December 2020) is divided into three phases characterised by different governance structures due to the FC’s enactment of emergency law. The analysis reveals that blame diffusion patterns vary considerably across phases and that blame spills out of the political system when fuzzy governance structures ‘lose their bite’. These findings are relevant for our understanding of democratic governance under pressure.

Keywords:

• Blame
• crisis
• governance
• accountability
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 ‘Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet’.

2 This assumption goes beyond the existing blame avoidance literature in two ways. First, and contrary to Hood (2011), who suggests that the purpose of blame avoidance strategies is to downplay and distance oneself from things that went wrong, we explicitly theorize that this logic also applies to not-yet-materialized losses/harms. Second, and contrary to Hinterleitner and Sager (2017), who suggest that presentational strategies are primarily applied in a reactive fashion (while only agency and policy strategies are applied in an anticipatory fashion), we propose that presentational strategies can also serve to distance oneself from a blameworthy event that might happen in the future.

3 As, for example, Ronald Reagan’s frequent labelling of disadvantaged women as ‘welfare queens’ suggests, governments may decide to blame only specific – and often weaker – parts of the population. This approach significantly reduces the probability that there will be a reputation-damaging counterattack. However, this type of targeted blaming should be less relevant during large-scale crisis situations when large parts of the citizenry are expected to comply.

4 See https://www.parlament.ch/press-releases/Pages/mm-vd-2020-03-15.aspx?lang=1033 (accessed 1 March 2022).

5 Usually Alain Berset (Head of the Department of Home Affairs), Ueli Maurer (Head of the Department of Finance), Guy Parmelin (Head of the Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research) and Simonetta Sommaruga (Head of the Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications and elected President of the Swiss Confederation (or ‘head of ministers’) during 2020).

6 Blame boomerangs did eventually occur when prominent scientists resigned from the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force (an interdisciplinary expert panel formed in March 2020) ‘in protest’ of the FC’s decisions. See, e.g., https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/ruecktritt-aus-corona-taskforce-in-der-schweiz-wird-oft-laviert-das-frustriert-die-experten (accessed 1 March 2022).

7 These are stylized slogans intended to summarize the essence of the FC’s blame-shifting onto a particular group of blame-shiftees.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Markus Hinterleitner

Markus Hinterleitner is a postdoctoral researcher at LMU Munich’s Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science. He is the author of numerous articles on political blame avoidance and the author of Policy Controversies and Political Blame Games (Cambridge University Press). [[email protected]]

Céline Honegger

Céline Honegger is a master’s student at the University of Bern and interested in the study of blame avoidance during times of crisis. [[email protected]]

Fritz Sager

Fritz Sager is Professor of political science at the KPM Centre for Public Management at the University of Bern. His research focuses broadly on public policy and public administration and has been published in numerous international political science, public administration and public policy journals. [[email protected]]