Blame games and democratic responsiveness

Hinterleitner, Markus (2022): Blame games and democratic responsiveness. In: European Journal of Political Research

Abstract

The link between opinion and policy is central to the functioning of representative democracy. Democracies are responsive to their citizens' preferences if citizens can influence governments' policy output. This article conceptualizes political blame games about policy controversies as venues of democratic responsiveness to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the opinion-policy link in policy-heavy, conflictual democracies. The article shows how political actors convert public feedback to a policy controversy into blame game interactions, which in turn lead to political and policy responses by the government. A comparative-historical analysis of nine blame games in the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland reveals how institutions structure blame game interactions, and thus influence a political system's responsiveness during blame games. The analysis suggests that an important, yet neglected, expression of democratic quality of political systems is their ability to translate blame game interactions into policy responses. The study of blame games as venues of democratic responsiveness thus provides a new conceptual tool for assessing the health of representative democracies in more conflictual times.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Social Sciences > Geschwister-Scholl-Institute for Political Science
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 320 Political science
• ISSN: 0304-4130
• Language: English
• DFG: Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - 491502892