Flinders, M. orcid.org/0000-0003-3585-9010 and Hinterleitner, M. orcid.org/0000-0001-9909-2715 (2025) The politics of blame-seeking: strategic antagonism, effective alignment and benefitting from backlash. Political Studies, 73 (1). pp. 434-453. ISSN 0032-3217
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 solely to taint opponents but also to demonstrate the blame-seeker’s willingness to challenge convention, break the rules, or side with the marginalized. In a broader context characterized by democratic dissatisfaction, anti-political sentiment and affective polarization, we suggest that blame-seeking assumes a powerful symbolic and performative dimension. Antagonizing certain sections of society and then harnessing the backlash provides a powerful political strategy which challenges traditional scholarly assumptions about credit and blame existing in a zero-sum relationship. We illustrate these arguments using the case of Boris Johnson’s rise to the British premiership. A focus on blame-seeking, we suggest, expands our understanding of what politicians say and do to achieve their goals in polarized political contexts.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | polarization; blame; populism; backlash; credit |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 12 Jun 2024 15:16 |
Last Modified: | 14 Mar 2025 14:57 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/00323217241251700 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:213262 |