No place to hide: The public attribution of responsibility for policy failures of international organisations

by Bernhard Zangl, Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Juliane Glovania, and Louisa Klein-Bölting

Who is held responsible when international organizations (IOs) fall short of public expectations? Scholarship on IO blame avoidance assumes that member states can hide behind IOs. As clarity of responsibility is assumed to be lacking in IOs, public responsibility attributions (PRA) will usually target the IO rather than individual member states.

We argue, by contrast, that even in complex IOs such as the European Union (EU), clarity of responsibility is not always lacking. Therefore, whether the IO in general or individual member states become the main target of public blame attributions depends on the type of IO policy failure.

In cases of failures to act and failures to comply, the responsibility of individual member states is comparatively easy to identify, and they thus become the main blame target. Only in cases of failures to perform clarity of responsibility is lacking, and the IO will become the main target of public blame attributions.

To assess the plausibility of this ‘failure hypothesis’, we study public blame attributions in two cases of EU foreign policy failures and two cases of EU environmental policy failures.

Published Online First in the Review of International Studies.