Varieties of European Blame Games

Abstract

Abstract Blame games have become a regular feature of European Union (EU) politics. While a fast-growing literature studies political actors’ blame-avoidance and blame-generation strategies in the EU, we still know little about which blame attributions ultimately ‘stick’ in the European public. This chapter shifts the perspective to those blame attributions—and the resulting blame games—that resonate in the public and thereby affect who is held accountable for EU policy failures. It distinguishes three types of European blame games which are characterized by their distinct blame targets and concomitant blame narratives: scapegoat games, where supra-national EU institutions are the main target of public blame attribution; renegade games, where individual EU member states are the predominant target; and diffusion games, where no specific actor emerges as a dominant target. The authors illustrate their typology by analysing public blame attributions reported on in the coverage of EU policy failures in the European quality press.