Passing the Buck to Intermediaries: The Externalization of Policymaking and the Politics of Blame Avoidance in the EU

With the shift from “permissive consensus” to “constraining dissensus” in the European Union (EU), policy solutions at the EU-level have become increasingly contested in the public. As a consequence, member state governments’ leeway to create problem- solving capacities at the EU-level are constrained. Against this backdrop, research emphasizes that EU member state governments increasingly rely on third party intermediaries, such as supranational EU-level actors, international organizations or third states, to address joint governance problems. While enlisting intermediaries can constitute a pragmatic strategy to circumvent political deadlock, it carries additional consequences. We argue that the externalization of policymaking to intermediaries can also constitute an effective blame avoidance strategy. Highly politicized issues incentivize EU member state governments to leave policymaking to third party intermediaries, as this allows them to avoid public responsibility attributions (PRA) by their constituencies. When governments give up hard control over the outcome, they become less visible in the public and can thus downplay or even plausibly deny their involvement in contested policies. In short, we hypothesize that the less control EU member state governments possess over an intermediary, the more the intermediary is likely to be blamed for a contested policy. We test whether the externalization of policymaking to intermediaries functions as a means for blame avoidance by comparing PRA in two instances of contested policies: First, the financial safeguards for highly indebted Eurozone countries during the financial crisis shifted from a EU safety net provided by the member states to the European Central Bank (ECB) acting as a lender of last resort. Second, EU member state governments externalized border control tasks that were originally conducted by the intergovernmental EU agency Frontex to the Libyan coast guard. By means of content analysis of newspapers from Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom, we assess whether PRA is predominantly directed to EU member states governments or the respective third parties. Overall, while EU member states have strong incentives to externalize policymaking to third parties for contested issues, this potentially violates constitutional principles such as democratic accountability and human rights protection. Passing the buck to third parties therefore risks to further undermine the EU’s legitimacy.