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The global economic blame game is reaching a crescendo as Americans go to the polls and Europeans approach critical decision points. And everyone -- from economists to central bankers, from television analysts to the person on the street -- seems to have a favorite scapegoat for Europe's recession and debt crisis, for America's feeble recovery and its recurrent political fiscal dramas, for dangerously high youth unemployment in a surprising member of countries, and for China's sudden economic slowdown. But four years into the global economic malaise that has followed the 2008 crash, the endless recriminations are more than just academic. Banks are at the top of most lists of bad guys. Enamored with the textbook characterization of efficient, unfettered capitalism and well-functioning markets, regulators gave the banks an enormous amount of rope with which to hang themselves. Instead of a blame game, people need a cooperative game. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractWho blames whom in multilevel blame games? Existing research focuses either on policymakers' preferences or their opportunities offered by the institutional structures in which policymakers operate. As these two strands of literature barely refer to each other, in this article we develop an integrated theoretical model of blame‐shifting in multilevel governance systems and assess it empirically. In line with the first strand, we assume that policymakers have a preference for shifting blame onto actors on a different level from themselves. In line with the second, we suppose that opportunities for doing so depend on institutional responsibility for policymaking and policy implementation. We check the plausibility of our integrated model by examining policymakers' blame attributions in three cases where European Union migration policies have been contested: border control, asylum, and welfare entitlements. We find that our integrated model does better in explaining blame‐shifting in these cases than the isolated models.

AbstractThe delegation of governance tasks to third parties is generally assumed to help governments to avoid blame once policies become contested. International organizations, including the European Union (EU), are considered particularly opportune in this regard. The literature lacks assessments of the blame avoidance effects of delegation, let alone of the effects of different delegation designs. To address this gap in the literature, we study public blame attributions in the media coverage of two contested EU policies during the financial crisis and the migration crisis. We show that the blame avoidance effect of delegation depends on the delegation design: When agents are independent (dependent) of government control, we observe lower (higher) shares of public blame attributions targeting the government (blame shifting effect), and when agents are external (internal) to the government apparatus, overall public blame attributions for a contested policy will be less (more) frequent (blame obfuscation effect). Our findings yield important normative implications for how to maintain governments' accountability once they have delegated governance tasks to third parties.

Abstract
Policing is a job characterised by high levels of blame risk, with the notion of blame becoming particularly prominent feature in law enforcement in recent years, with organisations often being quick to identify other external bodies as being cognisant in perpetuating this problem. This paper investigates the extent to which fear of blame exists within policing organisations, as well as the techniques utilised by staff to neutralise this particular hazard. I will utilise Hood's concept of 'the blame game' to investigate such techniques and will also outline how engaging in such games leads the organisation and its staff to pit themselves against one another by engaging in framing contests designed to shift the blame away from themselves onto other individuals within the organisation. This paper thus examines the extent to which policing organisations themselves perpetuate blaming practises and preserve the never-ending cycle of blame by engaging in such processes.

AbstractThis paper develops a novel account of the nature of blame: on this account, blame is a species of performance with a constitutive aim. The argument for the claim that blame is an action is speech-act theoretic: it relies on the nature of performatives and the parallelism between mental and spoken blame. I argue that the view scores well on prior plausibility and theoretical fruitfulness, in that: it rests on claims that are widely accepted across sub-disciplines, it explains the normativity of blaming and it accounts for associated psychological phenomena.

Recent writers in feminist ethics have been concerned to find ways to reclaim and augment women's moral agency. This essay considers Sarah Hoagland's intriguing suggestion that we renounce moral praise and blame and pursue what she calls an "ethic of intelligibility." I argue that the eschewal of moral blame would not help but rather hinder our efforts to increase our sense of moral agency. It would, I claim, further intensify our demoralization.