Discursive strategies of blame avoidance in government: A framework for analysis

Abstract

Governments’ policies and actions often precipitate public blame firestorms and mediated scandals targeted at individual or collective policy makers. In the face of losing credibility and resources, officeholders are tempted to apply strategies of blame avoidance which permeate administrative structures, operations and language use. Linguistic aspects of blame avoidance are yet to be studied by discourse analysts in great detail. In this article, I contribute to filling this gap in knowledge by proposing an improved heuristic for understanding typical macroconversational discursive practices adopted by officeholders in the circumstances of blame risk to achieve the goal of positive self-presentation. Based on a multidisciplinary review of scholarly literature, I show how personal and institutional risk aversion involves the application of certain strategies of argumentation, framing, denial, social actor and action representation, legitimation and manipulation. I use concrete textual examples from public statements of UK government officeholders to illustrate how blame avoidance works at the highest level of administration. I argue that to understand blame avoidance as a dominant recurring theme in public communication we should look beyond current linguistic approaches to conflict talk. This could lead to the application of new useful analytic tools within discourse studies and open new avenues of critical research into language use in politics and bureaucratic organisations.

La comunicación de crisis en política: el perdón como herramienta de restauración de imagen

“…Por otro lado, es interesante estudiar, como hace Hansson (2015), las estrategias discursivas para evitar la culpabilidad en los gobiernos. Este autor, comenta que este tipo de intentos incluyen: usar un lenguaje ambiguo o poco claro, echar la culpa a otros actores (trajectio in alium), desacreditar al oponente (argumentum ad hominem) exponer un argumento mayoritariamente aceptado (argumentum ad populum), esta blecer falsas analogías (post hoc ergo propter hoc); y por último apelar a la compa sión de la audiencia (argumentum ad misericordiam).…”

Linguistic Violence in Contemporary Russian Public Discourses

“…Without claiming to be exhaustive, below is an attempt to draw together the perspectives that illuminate linguistic violence: 1) Studies of aggression, impoliteness and conflict talk in everyday interpersonal communication (Irvine 1993;Tracy & Tracy 1998;Voroncova 2006a-b;Dymarskij 2008;Weiss 2008;Bousfield & Locher 2008;Culpeper 2011); 2) Works reflecting legal and forensic approaches to language, especially in relation to the crimes and regulation of speech (such as defamation, or in the case of Russian law, 'protection of honour, dignity and business reputation') (Cover 1986(Cover , 1993Shuy 2005Shuy , 2009Weiss 2009;Coulthart et al 2011;Goletiani 2011;Herz & Molnar 2012;Richter 2012;Reid 2013); 3) Violence exercised in political discourse (Rogan & Hammer 1997;Ilie 2004;Wodak et al 2013;Hansson 2015;Wodak 2015); 4) Media reporting on violence and conflict (e.g . Hart 2013;Lukin 2013;McDo-nald at el.…”

Calculated overcommunication: Strategic uses of prolixity, irrelevance, and repetition in administrative language

“…Some of the most common communicative choices in public administration related to deflecting blame include denying the problem, providing excuses and justifications, launching counter-attacks, delivering quick apologies, diverting attention or burying information, and keeping low profile (Hood, 2011;Hansson, 2015).…”

“…A proposal to introduceHood's (2011) blame avoidance framework into discourse studies is provided byHansson (2015).…”