Blame Avoidance, Crisis Exploitation, and COVID-19 Governance Response in Israel

Surprisingly, although the Israeli government consistently adopted unregulated, unorganized, inefficient, uncoordinated, and uninformed governance arrangements during the first wave of COVID-19, the public health outcome was relatively successful, a paradox that this theoretically informed paper seeks to explain. Drawing on insights from blame avoidance literature, it develops and applies an analytical framework that focuses on how allegations of policy underreaction in times of crisis pose a threat to elected executives’ reputations and how these politicians can derive opportunities for crisis exploitation from governance choices, especially at politically sensitive junctures. Based on a historical-institutional analysis combined with elite interviews, it finds that the selection of the most aggressive policy alternative on the policy menu at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, which occurred during a yearlong electoral impasse, and the subsequent consistent adoption of the aforementioned governance arrangements constituted a politically well-calibrated and highly effective short-term strategy for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.