Lisa Kriegmair – författare

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, and the type of policy implementation. To empirically probe these conditions, European Blame Games studies the blame games in ten instances of EU policy failures, including EU foreign policy, environmental policy, fiscal stabilization, and migration policy. Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford. This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

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, and the type of policy implementation. To empirically probe these conditions, European Blame Games studies the blame games in ten instances of EU policy failures, including EU foreign policy, environmental policy, fiscal stabilization, and migration policy. Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford. This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

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, and the type of policy implementation. To empirically probe these conditions, European Blame Games studies the blame games in ten instances of EU policy failures, including EU foreign policy, environmental policy, fiscal stabilization, and migration policy.Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars.The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Conditionality has become a popular instrument for achieving policy change in the European Union (EU). EU conditionality in the Euro crisis epitomises the responsiveness-responsibility dilemma that comes with increasing supranational influence on national policymaking: governments find it increasingly difficult to responsively address the needs of their citizens and simultaneously fulfil their obligations vis-à-vis supranational institutions. Blame avoidance strategies are a way to mitigate this problem, as they help governments shape public perceptions about who is to be held accountable for unpopular policies. During the Euro crisis, despite it being an easy target, governments facing EU conditionality did not indiscriminately shift blame to the EU. Instead, they drew on a variety of blame avoidance strategies. This book aims to shed light on this observed variation in governments’ strategy choices during the Euro crisis. To do so, it investigates the constraints that EU conditionality imposes on governments’ use of blame avoidance strategies and how governments chose specific strategies from the remaining blame avoidance toolkit.