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

Hinterleitner, Markus; Honegger, Céline; Sager, Fritz (2022). Blame avoidance in hard times: complex governance structures and the COVID-19 pandemic. West European politics, 46(2), pp. 324-346. Taylor & Francis 10.1080/01402382.2022.2064634

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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.

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