Commissioned Book Review: Markus Hinterleitner, Political Controversies and Political Blame Games
| Author | Matthew George McKenna |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929921990994 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(2) NP3 –NP4
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Policy Controversies and
Political Blame Games
990994PSW0010.1177/1478929921990994Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2021
Commissioned Book Review
Political Controversies and Political Blame
Games by Markus Hinterleitner. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020. 248 pp, £ 75.00,
ISBN: 9781108494861
Blame is everywhere. Politicians blaming one
another, media reports about politicians blaming
one another and now increasingly the pages of
political science journals discussing blame in
political life. Despite its rising popularity as a
subject for the discipline, the study of political
blame is divided conceptually and methodologi-
cally among various subdisciplines. Markus
Hinterleitner’s book Political Controversies and
Political Blame Games is his attempt to recon-
cile these disparate approaches, offering a novel
conceptual framework and empirical analysis
which provides a new direction for the study of
political blame. To state that this publication has
been timely would be an understatement. With
the entire globe currently trying to deal with the
consequences of COVID-19, the potential for
blame within and between national borders has
never been greater. For readers wanting to under-
stand the varying national blame games that will
follow as societies reflect upon the current period
of crisis, this book is a must read.
As a point of clarification, this book is a
study of the reaction to policy controversies,
rather than one which pays equal attention to
both controversy and blame. I start with this
clarification because readers primarily inter-
ested in policy controversies might feel cheated
by the publication’s title. Yet a focus upon reac-
tion points to one of the central arguments made:
whether a policy and the associated actors sur-
vive controversy depends upon the way an
event’s characteristics interact with the institu-
tional features of a political system. Blame pro-
duced from controversy is always institutionally
situated, and this must be recognised when
attempting to understand the consequences of
political blame. Yet while blame is shaped by
the institutional environment it takes place in, it
is also conceived as a substantially different
mode of politics, one in which argumentation is
left by the wayside and ‘guilt, punishment and
redress takes centre’ (p. 5).
To demonstrate the relationship between
institutions and blame, Hinterleitner analyses 15
policy controversies across the UK, Switzerland,
Germany and the USA using a compound
research design (p. 11). This design permits
comparison between two contextual dimensions
of a controversy: the country it takes place in
and the degree of proximity and salience with
the public. In doing so, Hinterleitner is able to
compare the same type of controversy (one
which directly impacts citizens and resonates
intensely with public sentiment) in multiple
countries and explore the differences in the
resultant blame games and their consequences.
One counter-intuitive finding among many is
that the UK’s Westminster system, commonly
understood to produce adversarial politics,
experiences less disruptive blame games com-
pared with those found in Germany, a political
system normally associated with deliberation
and cooperation. Before the reader takes this as
a ‘one up’ for the UK, its lack of consequential
blame games is explained by institutional blame
barriers protecting incumbents from public sen-
timent, regardless of the public’s intensity (p.
182). Hardly a win for democracy.
The value of this publication is that it shows
that blame is not solely a cognitive/behavioural
phenomenon, but is something shaped by the
context it takes place in. Unfortunately, its pri-
mary weakness stems from the theoretical
assumptions regarding context. Hinterleitner
distinguishes between institutional and inter-
pretive contextual factors. The former, such as
conventions of responsibility, are considered as
institutional because they are static and
unchanging (p. 26). The latter, such as the
degree of proximity and salience a controversy
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