From Machiavelli’s advice that “princes should delegate to others the enactment of unpopular measures and keep in their own hands the distribution of favours” (The Prince, 2003 [1532], p. 61), through to Walter Bagehot’s (The English Constitution, 1968 [1867], p. 151) concerns about the need for a “protecting machine [to] stand between the department and the busybodies and crotchet-makers of the House and the country,” the analysis of blame (i.e. attribution and amplification, pitfalls and pathologies) has always been a central concern of political science. To enter this rich seam of scholarship is to enter the realm of “foxes” who are wily enough to avoid blame-based traps, and “lions” who are strong enough to escape such traps (the former highlighting anticipatory blame games, the latter reactive blame games). In recent years, this field has grown exponentially as (inter alia) interdisciplinary studies, new case studies, and an emphasis on the impact of social media have added to this corpus of knowledge.

Despite the growth in the subfield, it is possible to suggest that it has been dominated by the intellectual influence of two particularly significant scholarly reference points—the first being Kent Weaver’s classic article, “The Politics of Blame Avoidance” (in Journal of Public Policy, 1986), and the second, Christopher Hood’s equally prominent “The Risk Game and the Blame Game” (in Government and Opposition, 2002). Due to their significance in terms of framing and conceptualizing blame—plus their obvious complementarity—these two pieces set in motion a form of intellectual path dependency whereby the work of Weaver and Hood provided the foundations on which subsequent analyses in the field were built.

To some extent, Markus Hinterleitner’s Policy Controversies and Political Blame Games continues this tradition, but it also goes far beyond the realms of existing studies. The key to this contribution is to be found not within the work of Weaver and Hood but within a powerful 2017 review by Ching Leong and Michael Howlett (in Policy Sciences), which suggested that a full understanding of the distribution of “credit and blame” could only be achieved if scholars moved away from a tight focus on executive politics, individualized strategies, and implicit rational choice-theoretic cost-benefit assumptions, and instead rebalanced their approaches through a more sophisticated and subtle grasp of the role of contextual dimensions. In many ways, this is exactly what Hinterleitner has delivered, and it explains why Policy Controversies and Political Blame Games is likely to emerge as a key and central reference point in the field, alongside the works of Weaver and Hood.

The book provides a context-sensitive explanation of blame games and their consequences, which is developed and tested through the analysis of 15 blame games in the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. Hinterleitner’s main argument is that the study of blame games offers crucial insights into how democratic political systems change and function when they switch into “conflict mode” or “heat up.” Two insights offer some sense of the distinctiveness and originality of this book.

The first relates to the “institutional imprint” within a polity and how that creates a set of preconditions or “rules of the game” that structure and channel the viable distribution of credit and (more often) blame. What Hinterleitner’s analysis reveals is how and why dominant assumptions about the characteristics of polities can be inverted during intense policy controversies. The UK, for example, is well known for being an aggressive, adversarial, power-hoarding, majoritarian polity. In contrast, Germany is known for its more considered and consensual policy style. And yet, Germany exhibits a far more heated and adversarial “blame game style” than the UK. This finding takes us back to Walter Bagehot’s nineteenth-century creation of an “accountability shield” in the form of the convention of individual ministerial responsibility to parliament and an executive drawn from the legislature. The “busybodies and crotchet-makers” of the legislature, who might like to meddle in executive affairs or engage in blame games, are generally restricted in all but the most exceptional circumstances (as recent British governments have found in relation to Brexit) due to the executive’s tight control of a parliamentary majority.

The second insight is arguably more distinctive in terms of taking forward this body of scholarship due to the manner in which it focuses on what might be termed “bringing the audience in.” Where Leong and Howlett (p. 599) encouraged researchers to study “more widely from the view of the public as well as that of the public official, and that both concepts [credit and blame] should be analysed as part of the larger issue of the legitimation of public actions,” (2017, p. 599) Hinterleitner has responded by building an emphasis on both issue “salience” and public “proximity” into the analysis of blame. “Opponents who generate blame for a distant-salient controversy,” he notes, “use emotions to attract the public’s attention and argue that political incumbents have a moral obligation to address the controversy” (p. 188). For incumbents, such challenges represent “a prickly affair,” but it is in being able to gauge and comprehend the dialectical interplay between agency, context, and structure that Hinterleitner is able to add tone and texture to case studies that might otherwise have remained descriptively heavy but intellectually light.

This is an intellectually heavy and incredibly impressive work. It is also one that matters both within and beyond academe in the sense that as concerns increase regarding the growth of antipolitical sentiment, heightening populist pressures and the emergence of a distinct form of negatively inflected “grievance politics” within many advanced liberal democracies, political and social scientists need to expand and develop their analytical tool kits in order to—where possible and appropriate—“defuse” or “cool down” policy controversies. If Hinterleitner’s analysis reveals one thing, it is that intense and bad-tempered policy controversies tend to produce far more heat than light. But it is arguably less heat and more light that is needed if the rather depressing concerns about the “death,” “suicide,” “crisis,” or “twilight” of democracy are to be addressed. Anne Applebaum’s book of 2020, Twilight of Democracy, provides a powerful primer on “how demagogues win,” and it might usefully be read alongside John Keane’s The New Despotism [2020] or even his To Kill a Democracy [with Debasish Roy Chowdhury, 2021], to achieve a general sense of how a specific focus on blame attribution, blame generation, and blame games fits within far broader debates about the health of democracy.

Like all good books, Hinterleitner’s Policy Controversies and Political Blame Games stimulates as many questions as it answers while also highlighting a number of potentially fertile avenues for further research. From an institutional perspective, the work points to the need for further work on the tools and tactics of depoliticization—not just in the sense of establishing blame buffers but, more fundamentally, in the sense of explaining public disaffection and disengagement from politics. Putting powers and responsibilities beyond the direct control of politicians might be rational from a blame-based perspective, which is aware of the “credible commitment” dilemma faced by elected politicians. But the “hollowing out” of democracy by politicians in the form of wholesale delegation is unlikely to nurture public confidence or political engagement.

A pivot point linking this theme to far broader debates concerning the future of democracy would be Colin Hay’s Why We Hate Politics (2007) with its emphasis on gradations of both depoliticization and repoliticization. Hay’s work can also be folded back into Hinterleitner’s approach and, more specifically, the attempt to comprehend the social construction of issue salience. The critical element that is touched on but that deserves far greater analysis and elaboration revolves around the strategic deployment of emotional triggers. As Hinterleitner observes in a number of case studies, “They [the blame-givers] leverage emotions in order to attract the public’s attention and to simultaneously create moral pressure so that incumbents take action” (p. 146). Notwithstanding the contribution of works such as Mary Douglas’s Risk and Blame (1992), the role of emotions such as fear, disgust, and hate within narratives of guilt, shame, and culpability open up new horizons for the analysis of credit and blame, which (again) offer fresh connections into political psychology, cultural studies, and a host of other fields. It is in exactly this vein, for example, that Applebaum highlights the role of nostalgia as a particularly powerful polarizing force. The intellectual organization of political hatreds by political actors, and the use and abuse of emotional impulses, are areas far beyond the territory of Policy Controversies and Political Blame Games, but the fact that the book sparks a discussion that roams so widely reflects exactly why it is likely to become a central reference point in the field.