The Politics of Blame-Seeking: Strategic Antagonism, Effective Alignment and Benefitting From Backlash
Matthew Flinders,
Markus Hinterleitner
Abstract:Why would a politician ever want to be blamed? Under what contextual conditions might blame-seeking behaviour emerge as a rational strategy? What tactics, tools and strategies might they deploy? Where is the empirical evidence of blame-seeking in action and why does it matter? These are the questions this article engages with as it challenges the long-standing ‘self-evident truth’ within political science that blame-is-bad. We argue that a new ‘blame game’ has emerged in which blame generation is deployed not … Show more
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