This review is being submitted late. I have no one to blame but myself, but my procrastination is, I suggest, a positive development. It has permitted me to read the book during the blaming frenzy that accompanied the partial shutdown of the United States government and the rollout of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). All of Christopher Hood’s varieties of blame and blame avoidance were on lurid display in those weeks. Once one masters his taxonomy of strategies, it is hard not to try to fit each new instance into one of his categories and to reflect on its implications for policy and for democratic functioning.
The book is an extended essay on a topic that has interested Hood for many years and that has produced a body of comparative studies of bureaucratic and political operation, written by Hood alone and with numerous co-authors. The Blame Game synthesizes and explicates Hood’s work on blame in a lively and persuasive manner that dissects the concept and helps one to see it in context. It sounds a warning to policy analysts about how efforts at objective analysis can be hijacked into the blame game. More worryingly, it suggests that, if things go wrong, those social scientists on the policymaking front line are as likely as anyone else to try to deflect blame.
Hood isolates three ways to avoid or limit blame: presentation strategies, agency strategies, and policy or operational strategies. These are not mutually exclusive; some can be combined to reduce blame while others are in tension.
The most straightforward set of strategies involves presentation. There are four sub-categories. The first is to make arguments that convince others that what looks blameworthy at first blush is actually a good outcome. Second, officials may “draw a line,” that is, concede error but state that the mistake is behind them and will not recur. This is how public officials responded to the website problems faced by those trying to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Changing the subject is a third option that buries bad news. For example, on the radio this morning a reporter explained a presidential visit to Massachusetts as an effort to divert attention from congressional testimony on the problems of the healthcare rollout. I learned from a year working in the US government that bad news is routinely made public late on Friday—a strategy that may no longer be effective. Finally, the object of blame can try to keep a low profile—not always a viable option.
The second strategy, agency, concerns institutional form and can apply to both government and private sector organizations. As Hood points out, if a problem arises, those at the top, middle and bottom of an organization will try to shift the blame elsewhere—to others at their level or up or down the chain of command. A decentralized system is one way for top officials to avoid taking the blame for the behavior of subordinates. For example, corporate boards and top executives set up corporate social responsibility and integrity systems so that if anything goes wrong, top managers can disclaim responsibility. If corporations can be criminally liable for the corrupt acts of their employees, they will create structures that protect the firm from liability, even if they do not actually deter payoffs by their employees or subcontractors. Alternatively, rather than outsourcing blame, organizations and individuals can band together so that it is difficult to figure out who is at fault. Hood cites the example of public/private partnerships (PPPs), a much-touted way to finance infrastructure or to provide services. Whatever their other merits, PPPs make it difficult to pin the blame definitively on anyone. The complex relationships between the multitude of private contractors and government agencies, although not a formal PPP, serve the same function; each part of the system is blaming the others for failures.
Third, policies can be designed and carried out with built-in blame avoidance features. Of course, designing an effective, well-working policy is one option, but it is not the only one. Others are to make evidence of failure hard to find, to avoid taking on problems with a high blame risk, to develop a set of rigid protocols, and to engage in “due diligence” ex ante that permits deniability ex post. Organizations can also seek to shift blame out of their bailiwick to others, such as customers, clients, or suppliers. This strategy sometimes can be accomplished through spin as when the Obama administration blames the Republicans in Congress for the government shutdown and vice versa. The underlying organization of the United States government encourages this strategy; it is set up to facilitate certain types of blame games, even if it was not initially designed with that goal in mind.
Hood speculates on whether blame games have intensified in recent years and shows how the alternative strategies can complement or compete with each other. One of his favorite words is “but”. He presents arguments for a growth in blaming or the complementary of various strategies, say, and then the next paragraph begins with “but” as he canvasses the counter arguments. These arguments all sound plausible, and, as he recognizes, many of the questions that he raises are empirical ones that have no clear-cut conceptual answers. Nevertheless, given his own long involvement with these issues, one would have liked to know more about his overall assessment of the current situation.
Hood does seek to evaluate the impact of the blame game in the last chapter. This is a welcome effort to move beyond taxonomy to judgment. He believes that blaming is ubiquitous in any organization and, indeed, in any human interaction. Organizations, however, present a wider range of strategies than ordinary human interactions. Hood argues that efforts to avoid blame, on the one hand, and to uncover malfeasance or incompetence, on the other, have positive features so long as they produce constructive responses—such as the promulgation of good policies, transparency, effective partnerships, or genuine due diligence. Although one gets the sense that Hood is not overly optimistic that positive blame avoidance will trump negative blame avoidance, he ends with a set of strategies designed to produce positive effects. Presentational strategies that seek to win the argument can raise the level of public debate. Hard delegation of responsibility can help pinpoint responsibility for failures, and policies implemented through clear protocols will improve transparency. But …
One ends the book believing that blaming is here to stay and that it is a worrisome phenomenon. As Hood says, “once we start looking at the structure and operations of government and public services through blame-avoidance spectacles, much that would otherwise be hard to make sense of starts to come into sharper focus . . . . There is even a kind of beauty—albeit perhaps a chilling one—in blame-avoidance engineering and architecture, since it so starkly reflects a logic of design utterly different from the conventional clichés of good regulation, risk management, and organizational design” (p. 158).
In short, Hood has produced a cautionary tale for the modern welfare-regulatory state. Efforts at objective policy analysis are all very well, but officials need to consider what could go wrong—by accident or through the conscious efforts of opponents. If policies do go off the rails, reformers need to counteract finger pointing with constructive proposals, not defensive posturing that can lead to circular and counter-productive blaming.
