The Politics of Blame in the European Multi-Level System

The financial and migration crises have demonstrated that the European Union (EU) is an increasingly popular target for blame from national politicians. Yet, we know little about the conditions under which national politicians attribute blame to European policy-makers. Three different literatures lead us to diverging expectations about the direction of national politicians’ blame attributions and their relative explanatory power so far lacks systematic empirical assessment. (1) The literature on blame shifting and blame avoidance assumes blame to be shaped by politicians’ positions in the national political system: while opposition parties blame governing parties, the latter downplay their own responsibility and emphasize the responsibility of others. In particular, the multilevel EU policy-making structure presents for governments an opportunity to evade the oppositions’ blame by shifting responsibility onto the European level (blame avoidance thesis). (2) The literature on Euroscepticism assumes that it is predominantly politicians from Eurosceptic parties who blame EU institutions in order to mobilise voters. Politicians from traditional mainstream parties, in contrast, are assumed to remain largely silent on contested European policies as they try to de-politicise wedge issues (Euroscepticism thesis). (3) The literature on institutional design emphasises that the policy-specific authority structure shapes politicians’ blame attributions. If institutionalised responsibility in the policy-making process is clear, national politicians are not free in directing their blame, but it is confined to the decision-making actors. If, by contrast, the institutional structure is complex, the implementing actor stands out due to its public visibility. Thus, if implementation is conducted by an EU institution, it is expected to be the prime target of blame (authority thesis). To test these conjectures empirically, we go beyond previous studies conducting qualitative content analysis and introduce an automatized dictionary approach. We assess the direction, frequency, and sentiment of blame attributions in parliamentary debates in Germany and Austria with regard to four highly contested policies. Two of our cases comprise policies that were largely contested during the financial crisis, while the others were salient during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. By conducting a first study of the policy-specific direction of national politicians’ blame attributions, we contribute to the better understanding of political conflict in times of European crisis. In particular, we go beyond the predominant focus on either polity contestation and ‘big events’ (i.e. treaty change and elections), or the analysis of sheer salience of national politicians’ communication about EU policies. What is more, as politicians’ blame attributions hurt the public perception of and trust in EU institutions, the study of responsibility attributions bears important implications for the future course of European integration. By investigating the conditions under which European institutions carry the blame for contested policies, we provide an important link in the often proclaimed causal chain between crisis politics and the observed decreasing support for the European project in the public.