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Pass the buck or the buck stops here? The public costs of claiming and deflecting blame in managing crises

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2021

David Miller Open the ORCID record for David Miller [Opens in a new window]  and
Andrew Reeves
David Miller*
Affiliation:
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Vanderbilt University, USA
Andrew Reeves
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

When things go wrong, and the government may be to blame, the public support enjoyed by elected executives is vulnerable. Because attribution of responsibility is often not straightforward, elected executives can influence citizens’ evaluations of their performance through presentational strategies, or explanatory frames which describe their roles in the management of the crisis. We examine the effectiveness of two ubiquitous presentational strategies: blame claiming, where the executive accepts responsibility, and blame deflecting, where the executive shifts blame to others. Using survey experiments incorporating stylised and real-world stimuli, we find that blame claiming is more effective than blame deflecting at managing public support in the aftermath of crises. In investigating the underlying mechanism, we find that blame claiming creates more favourable views of an executive’s leadership valence. While elected executives are better off avoiding crises, we find that when they occur, “stopping the buck” is a superior strategy to deflecting blame.

Keywords

blame gameselected executivesgovernmental crisesresponsibility attributionsurvey experiments
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Public Policy , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 63 - 91
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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