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The discursive micro-politics of blame avoidance: unpacking the language of government blame games

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Abstract

Policymakers often engage in blame avoidance behaviour that affects the ways in which they structure their organisations, adopt policies and operating routines, and present their work to the public. The linguistic aspects of such behaviour have received relatively little academic attention. In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of policy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena. I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated ‘language games’, policy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in policy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.

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Notes

  1. Weaver’s conceptualisation of the politics of blame avoidance was notably influenced by the psychological theories of choice that emphasised the ‘negativity bias’: the notion that the perception of risk influences people’s decision making more than the prospect of potential gains (Kahneman and Tversky 1979).

  2. ‘Recontextualising’ is a term of art that is used in discourse studies to refer to the transformations that occur when a practice is turned into discourses, e.g., when it is written or spoken about in a variety of ways (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999; van Leeuwen 2008).

  3. Blame has both private (mental) and public (social) sides. Psychological studies of blame tend to focus on the former, unexpressed and invisible side: the results of experiments are usually interpreted as reflecting the test subjects’ moral emotions (e.g., anger, guilt, shame) and judgments, that is, evaluations of the wrongness and permissibility of actions, and socio-cognitive assessments of mental states and intentions of other persons. The mental processes may include perceiving an event (i.e., behaviour or outcome) as violating some norm, assessing the severity of the violation, establishing a causal link between the event and an agent (individual or group), judging whether the agent acted intentionally, considering what may have been the reasons for her action, considering the agent’s obligation and capacity for preventing norm violation (i.e., whether she should and could have avoided this), considering agent’s character, and experiencing moral emotions that interact with other mental processes (Malle et al. 2014; Alicke 2000; Shaver 1985; Weiner 2006). Psychologists who study the attribution of blame in the tradition of Heider (1958), note that the cause of an actor’s behaviour can be either internalised (e.g., attributed to her ability or effort) or externalised (attributed to situational factors, e.g., peer hindrance). A lot of research has focused on attributional biases, that is, systematic errors people tend to make when reasoning about the causes of behaviours. Probably the most widely known of these biases is called the fundamental attribution error—“the relative disregarding of situational causality or the over-allocation of dispositional ascriptions” (Weiner 2006, p. xvii).

  4. For a concise discussion of the various uses of the term ‘strategy’ in linguistics, see Culpeper (2015).

  5. For useful discussions of fallacious arguments, see, for instance, van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992), Reisigl and Wodak (2001), and Walton (2008).

  6. More broadly, the ways in which central bureaucracies and executive agencies adapt to the media have been studied by media scholars under the rubric of ‘mediatization’. For recent examples, see Garland et al. (2017), Thorbjørnsrud et al. (2014), Schillemans (2012), and Strömbäck (2008).

  7. Adut (2008) suggests that analytic approaches to scandal can be broadly divided into ‘objectivist’ and ‘constructivist’. Objectivists, like Thompson (2000), generally focus on instances of real misconduct (e.g., corruption) and discuss the causes of such deviance. Constructivists, however, tend to be more concerned with public reactions to and social construction of scandals as rituals that represent cultural divisions in society.

  8. Frames that are specific to news media can be divided into episodic and thematic: episodic framing, which is particularly common in television news, emphasises individual causality and thereby also individual blame (Iyengar 1990).

  9. However, the effects of scandal coverage to individual members of the audience are not straightforward: People do not directly subscribe to (often fragmentary) media frames of norm violations but interpret mediated representations of scandals based on their cognitive and emotional reactions and individual frames (Kepplinger et al. 2012).

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by the European Regional Development Fund and the programme Mobilitas Pluss (Grant No. MOBJD4). I am grateful to Ruth Wodak for her helpful comments on earlier drafts, and I thank Deborah Stone, Christopher Hood, and Kent Weaver for useful suggestions at the outset of this work.

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    Sten Hansson

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Hansson, S. The discursive micro-politics of blame avoidance: unpacking the language of government blame games. Policy Sci 51, 545–564 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-018-9335-3

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