European Blame Games: Where Does the Buck Stop?

Who is held responsible when EU policies fail? Which blame games resonate in the European public? This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that the complexity of EU decision-making eschews clarity of responsibility, thereby rendering European blame games untargeted and diffuse. It is argued that the politicization of EU policies triggers a plausibility assessment of blame attributions in the public domain with the effect that European blame games gravitate towards true responsibilities, targeting those political actors involved in enacting a policy that is subsequently considered a policy failure. The paper distinguishes three kinds of European blame games: in scapegoat games, supranational EU institutions are held responsible for a policy failure; renegade games occur when individual member state governments are considered the culprits for a failed policy; when responsibility for a policy failure is shared between EU institutions and member states, diffusion games prevail. The paper explores three conditions to explain when each of the three European blame games prevails: the type of policy failure, the type of policy making, and the type of policy implementation. To empirically probe these conditions, we study the blame games in ten instances of EU policy failures, including EU foreign policy, environmental policy, fiscal stabilization and migration policy.