Blame Shifting Strategies in Multilevel Systems of Governance: Some lessons from Italy and Spain

Existing research suggests mandate responsiveness varies across time depending on external factors –mainly economic conditions—, and changing institutional factors, like the type of government. The mismatch between electoral promises and policy decisions reflects the needs of policy makers to adapt their initial priorities to changing external conditions like economic crisis, or/and to the preferences of the different parties of the coalition government. In this paper we argue the decline of mandate responsiveness is linked not only to bad economic conditions and minority governments, but especially the consolidation of multilevel system of governance. Delegation of issue jurisdiction upward to the EU and downward to sub-national governments generates a new political context characterized by the increasing complexity of the policy making process. National governments have to negotiate with a growing number of policy actors to translate their policy promises into decisions, and citizens have a less clear idea of which policy actors are responsible to do what. In this context, we argued, the costs of not responding to electoral promises declines basically because governmental actors have more possibilities to engage in a process of blame shifting strategies. Following this argument, in this paper we analyse blame shifting strategies of governing parties in Spain and Italy regarding economic issues from 1982 to 2015. To do this we rely on the speeches databases created by the Spanish and Italian teams of the comparative Agendas Project.