Ministers as blame managers: interpreting ministerial accountability strategies during political incidents – the cases of the Netherlands and New South Wales

Ministers face increasing pressure to account for media-induced and politicized incidents. In many countries both the calls for resignations and actual individual political resignations have increased (Dowding and Dumont, 2015; Dowding and Lewis, 2012; Bovens et al, 2015). Ministers are under pressure to account for all manner of incidents occurring in their portfolio or their person. To ward off blame and to survive in office with their authority intact, they must defend themselves in a way that is convincing to media, legislators, their government leader and ministerial colleagues (and the Premier), and to some extent the top of the public service (Boin et al, 2009; Hood et al, 2009; Brändström & Kuipers, 2003). While most studies of blame management used case studies to distil and test models of ‘staged retreat’ (Hood et al, 2009), recent studies underlined the need to study differences in attribution of blame in various political systems and cultural contexts. The central puzzle of this study is how political actors use different notions of political risk and institutional appropriateness to interpret ministerial blame management in a consociational (the Netherlands) and a Westminster context (New South Wales, Australia). Sixty interviewees (former ministers, parliamentarians, journalists, and civil servants) interpret ministerial behavior in a series of qualitative vignettes (hypothetical but credible scenarios, Jenkins et al, 2010). The article shows that political actors in coalition setting focus more on party-political than on electoral risk and a more accommodative and bipartisan stance towards adversaries (institutional appropriateness).