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From coping with Covid-19 through to manging climate change, from Brexit through to the barricading of Congress, from democratic disaffection to populist pressures, from historical injustices to contemporary social inequalities, and from scapegoating through to sacrificial lambs... the common thread linking each of these themes and many more is an emphasis on blame. But how do we know who or what is to blame? How do politicians engage in blame-avoidance strategies? How can blaming backfire or boomerang? Are there situations in which politicians might want to be blamed? What is the relationship between avoiding blame and claiming credit? How do developments in relation to machine learning and algorithmic governance affect blame-based assumptions?By focusing on the politics and governance of blame from a range of disciplines, perspectives, and standpoints this volume engages with all these questions and many more. Distinctive contributions include an emphasis on peacekeeping and public diplomacy, on source-credibility and anthropological explanations, on cultural bias and on expert opinions, on polarisation and (de)politicisation, and on trust and post-truth politics. With contributions from the world's leading scholars and emerging research leaders, this volume not only develops the theoretical, disciplinary, empirical, and normative boundaries of blame-based analyses but it also identifies new research agendas and asks distinctive and original questions about the politics and governance of blame.

Political life in advanced democracies is steeped in negativity towards bureaucracy. Politicians, parties, and the media routinely blame the bureaucracy for all kinds of political, social, or economic problems. Whenever there is controversy to be processed, bureaucracy is often the scapegoat. While one might expect this negativity to be due to the bureaucracy's actual performance, or simply a reflection of more general frustrations with democracy, the truth lies elsewhere. We don't blame the bureaucracy so much because its performance is so poor or because we're fed up with how things are run in our countries, but rather because democracies are characterized by dynamics and discourses in which the bureaucracy almost “automatically” finds itself at the receiving end of blame. This book is the first to unpack these dynamics. For many actors, blaming the bureaucracy is the most convenient thing to do in controversial and conflictual situations-of which there are many in modern democracies. Bureaucracy is everyone's favorite scapegoat because it can be plausibly blamed for almost anything and because it is unlikely to fight back. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy is far too valuable to be everyone's punching bag. Rampant bureaucracy blaming undermines administrative performance and creates a public discourse in which a weak and curtailed bureaucracy becomes popular. Because bureaucracy blaming threatens to dismantle the very structures that sustain our democracies, this problematic political activity deserves our full attention.

In modern, policy-heavy democracies, blame games about policy controversies are commonplace. Despite their ubiquity, blame games are notoriously difficult to study. This book elevates them to the place they deserve in the study of politics and public policy. Blame games are microcosms of conflictual politics that yield unique insights into democracies under pressure. Based on an original framework and the comparison of fifteen blame games in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and the US, it exposes the institutionalized forms of conflict management that democracies have developed to manage policy controversies. Whether failed infrastructure projects, food scandals, security issues, or flawed policy reforms, democracies manage policy controversies in an idiosyncratic manner. This book is addressed not only to researchers and students interested in political conflict in the fields of political science, public policy, public administration, and political communication, but to everyone concerned about the functioning of democracy in more conflictual times. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.