Where Does the Buck Stop?

Clarity of Responsibility and the Public Blame Attribution for IO policy failures

Working paper

Who is held responsible when the policies of international organizations (IOs) fail? This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that the complexity of IO decision-making eschews clarity of responsibility, thereby providing political actors with the opportunity to avoid blame and scapegoat IOs. It is argued that the politicization of IO policy failures contributes to a process of information updating that constrains political actors’ opportunistic blame attributions. In consequence, public blame attributions tend to target those political actors involved in enacting a policy that is subsequently considered a policy failure. We hypothesize that the more member states (supranational IO bodies) are truly responsible for IO policy failures the more likely public blame attributions will focus on specific member states (supranational IO bodies). To empirically probe this claim, it studies the public blame attributions in ten instances of EU policy failures – from EU foreign policy and environmental policy to fiscal stabilization and migration policy – by analyzing their coverage in the European quality press. The analysis of 1.668 blame attributions across four countries – Austria, France, Germany, and the UK – corroborates our theoretical expectations that blame attributions focus on specific IO actors when supranational IO bodies are responsible for failures. When member states are clearly responsible for IO policy failures, blame attribution tend to focus on member states. And only when member states and supranational IO bodies share responsibility for the making and implementation of IO policy failures, public blame attributions are generic and target the IO in general or the collective of member states. These results suggest that blame games, at least in cases in which responsibilities for IO policy failures is straightforward, can contribute to – rather than undermine – political accountability.

Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Berthold Rittberger, Bernhard Zangl: Where Does the Buck Stop? Clarity of Responsibility and the Public Blame Attribution for IO policy failures. Paper presented at the ECPR General Conference, 26-29 August 2025, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.