European Blame Games: Where does the buck stop?

by Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Berthold Rittberger, Bernhard Zangl, and Lisa Kriegmair

Who is held responsible when EU policies fail? Which blame games resonate in the European public? European Blame Games challenges the conventional wisdom that the complexity of EU decision-making eschews clarity of responsibility, thereby rendering European blame games untargeted and diffuse.

The book argues that the politicization of EU policies triggers a plausibility assessment of blame attributions in the public domain with the effect that European blame games gravitate towards true responsibilities, targeting those political actors involved in enacting a policy that is subsequently considered a policy failure.

It distinguishes three kinds of European blame games:

• In scapegoat games, supranational EU institutions are held responsible for a policy failure.
• Renegade games occur when individual member state governments are considered the culprits for a failed policy.
• When responsibility for a policy failure is shared between EU institutions and member states, diffusion games prevail.

The book also explores three conditions to explain when each of the three European blame games prevails:

• the type of policy failure 
• the type of policy making
• the type of policy implementation

To empirically probe these conditions, European Blame Games studies the blame games in ten instances of EU policy failures from different policy areas:

• foreign policy
• environmental policy
• fiscal stabilization
• migration policy

The book is part of the series "Transformations in Governance", edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (Oxford University Press).