How politicians use blame-shifting to avoid accountability
It's always somebody else's fault. State policies. County gov't malfeasance. Systemic something. Local politicians sidestep accountability for failed programs by deflecting blame somewhere, anywhere else--as long as responsibility isn't theirs. Governance website examines the science behind the modern day political dodge.
Public officials use blame avoidance strategies when communicating performance information. While such strategies typically involve shifting blame to political opponents or other governments, we examine how they might direct blame to ethnic groups.
This article extends research on blame avoidance in two ways. First, it examines how the use of an outgroup trigger to convey performance information shapes who the public blames.
Second, we assess whether the impact of outgroup scapegoating on who the public blames varies according to performance information framing and perceptions of the performance context.
Government officials spin performance information to manage public perception and recast poor performance in a more positive light. While this helps them avoid a negativity bias in performance evaluation and mitigate blame (Olsen, 2015), how performance information framing interacts with outgroup scapegoating is unclear.
This gap in knowledge is important because blame avoidance strategies are seldom used in isolation. By positively framing testing data and improving perceptions of the government's response to the pandemic, did Trump inadvertently weaken the effect of scapegoating? Conversely, does scapegoating result in greater outgroup blame when performance information is negatively framed and evaluations of performance more critical?
These findings advance public management research on performance information by demonstrating how members of the public use performance information to attribute blame (van den Bekerom et al., 2021). Further, they contribute to the public management literature on blame avoidance by exploring blame attribution in a context of public health outcomes that are highly salient, rapidly changing, and related to intense concerns about personal safety across society.
While past research has explored blame attribution in the context of crises (Bisgaard, 2015) and government contracting (Leland et al., 2021), blame avoidance research more typically considers how public opinion might be influenced by blame shifting to other political opponents or governments (Hong et al., 2020), rather than how the public responds when other members of the public may be included among the targets of blame.
Further research has explored how the use of racial epithets impacts attitudes toward ethnic groups (Dhanani & Franz, 2021). We bridge these research streams by examining how the relationship between outgroup triggers and blame attribution is impacted by public service provision context and perceptions of government performance. As elites throughout the world increasingly use populist appeals to garner public support, understanding how government performance shapes public responses to such divisive rhetoric is critical.
Partisan motivated reasoning and blame attribution
Motivated reasoning suggests citizens evaluate members of the political party they identify with more positively and are more critical of the performance of parties they oppose (Jilke & Bækgaard, 2020). In other words, partisan ideology establishes a basis for blame attribution. While crises can sometimes engender a tendency to “rally around the flag,” political ideology offers a heuristic by which individuals make sense of crises where the situation is dynamic and facts are contested (Bisgaard, 2015). For example, Democratic voters blamed a Republican President after the poor response to Hurricane Katrina, while Republicans blamed a Democratic governor (Malhotra & Kuo, 2008).
Scapegoating as a blame avoidance strategy
Public management research is most attentive to motivated reasoning that is driven by political ideology. However, other sources of motivated reasoning, such as outgroup attitudes, may also influence responses to blame avoidance strategies.
Pre‐existing negative attitudes lead people to craft narratives that attribute blame for negative events to groups they do not identify with (Joslyn & Haider‐Markel, 2017, p. 361). Outgroups can be constructed in different ways. One obvious source of difference is ethnic or racial differences.
Performance information framing as a blame avoidance strategy
Performance measurement systems are premised on the hope they can make blame attribution easier, by rendering governmental outcomes more legible to the public. Nevertheless, like outgroup triggers, performance information is commonly manipulated by elected officials who seek to obfuscate blame attribution (Bevan & Hood, 2006), and bias interpretation (James et al., 2020).
Studies show citizens consistently use performance information to form judgments and make decisions, especially in visible and salient service areas, such as education and health (James and Van Ryzin, 2017). This work also suggests that a negativity bias makes the use of performance information when attributing blame and credit asymmetric: negative performance scores gain attention and activate attribution in a way that positive performance does not (van den Bekerom et al., 2021). For example, members of the public are more inclined to engage in attributional reasoning when they are exposed to negatively framed as opposed to positively framed, yet equivalent, performance information (Olsen, 2015).
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