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From ‘Normal Incidents’ to Political Crises: Understanding the Selective Politicization of Policy Failures1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Annika Brändström  and
Sanneke Kuipers
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Abstract

This article aims to enhance understanding of selective politicization processes in policy failures and examine the attempts of policy-makers to use framing strategies to allocate blame. The policy response to alleged submarine intrusions in Sweden and Dutch military involvement in the fall of Srebrenica are the two case-studies used in this article. These cases will be analysed using three perspectives derived from the literature on framing: depicting events as violations of core public values; depicting events as operational incidents or as symptoms of endemic problems; allocating accountability and blame for the occurrence and/or ‘mismanagement’ of crisis. Finally, we present a conceptual framework of the different shapes that political blaming can take when certain framing strategies are adopted.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , 2003 , pp. 279 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2003.

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Footnotes

1

We wish to express our gratitude to Paul ’t Hart for his invaluable support. We are also grateful to our colleagues at the Leiden University Crisis Research Centre and the Centre for Crisis Management Research and Training at the Swedish National Defence College for their useful comments in seminar discussions early on. Many thanks also to Chavi Nana for corrections.

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