International organizations (IOs) are commonly considered convenient scapegoats. Their technocratic nature and global mandates invite attacks from populist-nationalist politicians, and their complex and opaque structures allow opportunistic member state governments to avoid blame for unpopular policies and crises. Scapegoating IOs risks undermining their legitimacy and effectiveness and undermining democratic accountability. Yet, we know surprisingly little about who blames who, why and with what consequences.

We would like to address this gap by jointly examining who blames who in IO blame games, why, and with what consequences. The workshop’s goals are twofold: (1) Connecting different research strands that have produced important yet isolated insights in the context of specific IOs, such as the European Union (EU), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Health Organization (WHO), employing different methods from content analysis to survey experiments. (2) Broadening the conversation about IO blame games by entering into dialogue with other research traditions, focusing on domestic and European politics, populist foreign policy, as well as the legitimacy, accountability, and politicization of IOs.

Research questions addressed by contributions include: Who blames who in IO blame games? When do governments, opposition parties, or IO-level actors engage in blame games or refrain from them? Under which conditions are IO bodies, specific member states, or the IO in general blamed? How do IO actors respond to blame? How do IO blame games affect the performance and legitimacy of the targeted organizations? And under which condition do blame games contribute or undermine political accountability? Contributions range from commentaries from different theoretical perspectives to research articles employing different methods, from discourse analysis to survey experiments and from automatized content analysis to in-depth case studies.

The workshop will result in a joint publication of a special issue or forum in a leading journal, such as JEPP, WEP, RIO, Governance, Regulation and Governance, or Politics, to systematize the research agenda on IO blame games.