The first chapter introduces blame games as distinct political events characterized by a conflictual style of politics that is different from routine politics. It conceptualizes blame games as litmus tests that allow the understanding of how political systems change and function when they switch into ‘conflict mode’. This chapter then provides a glimpse of the institutionalized forms of conflict management that Western democracies have developed to deal with policy controversies. It goes on to argue that blame games are context-sensitive political events that require a comprehensive but parsimonious framework to study them across institutional and issue contexts. The chapter concludes with a chapter overview and a short presentation of the strategy of inquiry and data used.

This book is about how politicians govern the experts they put in charge of public decisions. It aims to challenge some common assumptions scholars of governance often make about how experts come to be given power in liberal democratic states, and how subsequently they retain that power. There is a large and sprawling theoretical and conceptual literature on ‘the politics of expertise’ in governance and public policy that demands attention and informs what Andrew Gamble (1990) calls a conceptual ‘map’, which this book uses to frame the empirical case studies. This map does not involve the deduction of hypotheses and their empirical testing; it is a way of framing, in an encompassing manner, the empirical dynamics the book identifies in the following chapters. This map is what the book terms the expert–politics nexus, which refers to diverse political relationships between elected governments and civil servants, and ‘arm’s length’ expert-led agencies. To do so, the book offers a new approach to combining and linking previously disparate approaches to ‘expertise’ in governance research.

In October 2016, The Guardian published a story about what it called ‘The Cult of the Expert’, which had dominated the first decade of the twenty-first century (Mallaby, 2016). Following the global financial crisis, the chair of the US Federal Bank, Ben Bernanke, was asked by a congressional committee whether he had $85 billion to inject into the economy. ‘I have $800 billion’, he replied. ‘Somehow’, the Guardian noted, ‘America’s famous apparatus of democratic checks and balances did not apply to the monetary priesthood. Their authority derived from technocratic virtuosity’. Scholars have noted since the 1990s how political issues have tended to be put in the hands of so-called experts; scientists, lawyers, clinicians, economists and the like (Fischer, 1990; Barker and Peters, 1993; Hoppe, 1999; Maasen and Weingart, 2006). As political scientist Alasdair Roberts argued in his evocative 2011 book The Logic of Discipline, ‘the pervading sense was that liberal democracies lacked the capacity to make hard choices and that mechanisms were necessary to force those choices or empower technocrat-guardians who would make them on society’s behalf’ (Roberts, 2011, p. 144). Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Francis Fukuyama’s famously flawed ‘End of History’ thesis, ‘by the turn of the 21st century, a new elite consensus had emerged: democracy had to be managed’ (Mallaby, 2016).