The Politics and Governance and Blame

From coping with Covid-19 through to manging climate change, from Brexit through to the barricading of Congress, from democratic disaffection to populist pressures, from historical injustices to contemporary social inequalities, and from scapegoating through to sacrificial lambs... the common thread linking each of these themes and many more is an emphasis on blame.

But how do we know who or what is to blame? How do politicians engage in blame-avoidance strategies? How can blaming backfire or boomerang? Are there situations in which politicians might want to be blamed? What is the relationship between avoiding blame and claiming credit? How do developments in relation to machine learning and algorithmic governance affect blame-based assumptions?

By focusing on the politics and governance of blame from a range of disciplines, perspectives, and standpoints this volume engages with all these questions and many more. Distinctive contributions include an emphasis on peacekeeping and public diplomacy, on source-credibility and anthropological explanations, on cultural bias and on expert opinions, on polarisation and (de)politicisation, and on trust and post-truth politics.

With contributions from the world’s leading scholars and emerging research leaders, this volume not only develops the theoretical, disciplinary, empirical, and normative boundaries of blame-based analyses but it also identifies new research agendas and asks distinctive and original questions about the politics and governance of blame.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield, and Vice President of the Political Studies Association. He is a former board member of the Economic and Social Research Council, and Chair of the Universities Policy Engagement Network. He is the author of editor of eighteen books and over two hundred research articles on governance, public policy, and socio-political change. In addition to his academic work, he has served as a special advisor in both the House of Lords and House of Commons, and he has written and presented a number of documentaries for the BBC.

Markus Hinterleitner is a postdoctoral researcher at LMU Munich’s Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science. He received his PhD from the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 2018 and was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley in 2019 and at Brown University in 2020. He is the author of Policy Controversies and Political Blame Games (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and of numerous articles on blame-based politics, which have been published in journals such as the European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review, West European Politics, Governance, Policy Studies Journal, Journal of European Public Policy, and The Journal of Public Policy.

Rod Rhodes is the author or editor of 45 books and 11 journal symposia. He has also published some 200 articles and chapters in books. He previously served as editor in chief of Public Administration and Public Policy and Administration. He currently edits two book series, Political Ethnography for Manchester University Press and Transforming British Government for Palgrave-Macmillan. He was chair and vice-president of the UK’s Political Studies Association and Treasurer of the Australasian PSA. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK).

R. Kent Weaver is Professor of Public Policy and Government at Georgetown University. Weaver’s recent research focuses on understanding how political institutions, feedbacks from past policy choices and strategic behaviour of politicians interact to shape public policy choices. He is also interested in understanding the determinants of compliance and non-compliance with public policy across a variety of policy sectors. Weaver is the author and co-author of many books, including The Politics of Industrial Change, Do Institutions Matter?, Ending Welfare As We Know It, and Policy Feedbacks.

Dr Gergana Dimova is a lecturer in politics at the Florida State University London Program. Her scholarship analyses politics through a range of thematic lenses, such as democracy, blame games, uncertainty, accountability, and the media. Her work has appeared in the journals Democratizatsiya, Democratic Theory, Comparative Democratic Theory, Global Media Journal, the Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society and others. Dr Dimova is the commissioning co-editor of Cambridge University Press Elements in the Politics and Society in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She is an associate editor of the journal Democratic Theory and the convenor of the Politics and Anti-Politics Specialist Group of the UK Political Science Association. Dr Dimova obtained her MA and PhD from Harvard University and her post-doctoral degree from the University of Cambridge.