Confront or concede? Blame games as a test of cultural bias in different political systems

Abstract

Blame-avoidance studies in majoritarian settings demonstrate patterned behaviour—the so-called ‘staged retreat’ coined by Christopher Hood et al.—by politicians consecutively denying severity, responsibility, and punishment in relation to a blameworthy event. The staged retreat implies that executives will gradually accept more responsibility and consequences only if defensive options fail. This chapter scrutinizes the universality of these observations and argues that institutional settings—majoritarian and consociational systems—influence what blame-avoidance behaviour is expected and accepted. An elite interview study using qualitative vignettes in the Netherlands (consociational) and New South Wales (majoritarian) reveals that key actors in these systems have different behavioural expectations and implicit norms in relation to the same blameworthy events. This comparative study finds that the staged retreat only dominates in the majoritarian setting, with formal and informal institutional factors influencing the leeway for executives in majoritarian and consociational systems to dodge, reallocate, or attribute blame.