Policy failures lead to public blame not only at the national level, but also internationally. This project examines which actors become the primary targets of public blame when policy failures occur in the European Union: the supranational institutions or the national governments. Or do blame attributions remain diffuse due to the EU’s complex structures of institutional responsibility? Our research shows that public blame attribution is shaped fundamentally by institutional responsibility structures. Contrary to common expectations, national governments are only rarely able to use the EU’s supranational institutions as scapegoats.
Publications
- Zangl, B., Heinkelmann-Wild, T., Glovania, J., & Klein-Bölting, L. (2026). No place to hide: The public attribution of responsibility for policy failures of international organisations. Review of International Studies, 52(1), 189-206.
- Heinkelmann-Wild, Tim; Rittberger, Berthold; Kriegmair, Lisa & Bernhard Zangl, Bernhard (2024). European Blame Games. Where Does the Buck Stop? Oxford University Press.
- Heinkelmann-Wild, T., Zangl, B., Rittberger, B., & Kriegmair, L. (2023). Blame shifting and blame obfuscation: The blame avoidance effects of delegation in the European Union. European Journal of Political Research, 62(1), 221-238.
- Kriegmair, L., Rittberger, B., Zangl, B., & Heinkelmann-Wild, T. (2022). Dolce far niente? Non-compliance and blame avoidance in the EU. West European Politics, 45(5), 1153-1174.
- Heinkelmann‐Wild, T., & Zangl, B. (2020). Multilevel blame games: Blame‐shifting in the European Union. Governance, 33(4), 953-969.
- Heinkelmann-Wild, T., Kriegmair, L., & Rittberger, B. (2020). The EU multi-level system and the Europeanization of domestic blame games. Politics and Governance, 8(1), 85-94.