In his book Credit and Blame, Charles Tilly (2008:13) reminds us that
responsibility does not necessarily equal cause. Your judgment, my judgment, and a medical specialist’s judgment as to what actually caused a given hospital patient to die often turn out to be irrelevant for the assignment of blame. Cause–effect connections usually play only a secondary and contingent part in determination of responsibility. That determination typically emphasises judgments of intent and competence.
Likewise, Bovens and ’t Hart (1996:137–8) observe:
The crucial—but often implicit—question in…debates [about the causes of disasters] is where, when and how misfortune stops and mismanagement begins…Some failures have such grave consequences or pose such a threat to our worldview or sense of justice that ‘bad luck’, however appropriate in empirical terms, will not be accepted as an explanation. Especially those who have been injured will continue to look for someone to blame.
Anticipating and managing blame have become second nature to contemporary politicians and public servants. In an era of high visibility, floating voters, declining trust in traditional elites and institutions and collective obsession with risk and danger, those who govern and their servants are answerable for an awful lot. They have learned that when the news is bad, and the policies they have to sell are about retrenchment, contraction, redistribution benefits or allocating risks, the ‘politics of pain’ set in, with ‘blame avoidance’ being the name of the game (Pierson 1994; Hood 2002; Pal and Weaver 2003). So, when confronted with the biggest financial and economic breakdown in well more than half a century, the holders of executive office studied here knew there would be blame games to play. No matter that there was little dispute about the causal narrative of the crisis: this problem was ‘made in America’. This put former US President George W. Bush et al. on the spot, but implied that all the others were essentially off the hook. Nevertheless, most of them must have known that the story would not end there. Although the root causes of the credit crunch might have been beyond their control, nasty questions might still present themselves. Why did you not see it coming? Was our financial system really as resilient as it could have been? Did you do enough to mitigate the impact of the crisis once it was under way? Why have you not been leaning much harder on corporate excess? In making meaning about the developing financial crisis, therefore, our policymakers were not just managing the issues themselves; they were managing the potential political fallout from the issues. They also knew that other public voices—oppositions, sceptical journalists, expert besserwissers—would weigh in on the framing of responsibility.
As Table 2.1 suggests, they had roughly two options: deny all responsibility or accept that they could have done more and better in at least mitigation. Likewise, journalists, non-governing parties and other actors in the debate had the options of absolving government actors from (co-)culpability or pinpointing blame on them. Depending on the configuration of their choices, different types of blame games could ensue. And although there were some notable differences, the similarities stood out most. Careful study of the speeches across the nine jurisdictions reveals the following general pattern.
Issues of responsibility and blame do not enter the official discourse until the crisis is well under way, as the first impulse of most policymakers is to downplay the severity of the problems. They thus sidestep the very need for blame.
Once past the denial stage, speech-makers make a concerted attempt to exogenise the causes of the crisis across territorial (‘it’s the Americans’ or, in the case of Singapore, the West) and institutional (‘it’s the market’) borders. The fallback position is thus to attempt to deflect blame.
At the same time, virtually all of the politicians—unlike the national bank governors—attempt to moralise the issue, by accusing key corporate actors of ‘greed’, ‘recklessness’, ‘unscrupulousness’ and the like. They do some ‘pinpointing’ of their own. Like all blamers, they draw moral lines between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (Douglas 1992; Tilly 2008), so as to erase any doubt among their audiences about who is at fault (and who, by implication, should get off scot-free).
Virtually all speakers engage in attempts to ‘jump over’ blame, by moving straight from assessments of severity and causes to talk about the need for regulatory reform in the financial sector, domestically but most emphatically at the international level (see further below). This is a rhetorical feat: the system is broken and should be fixed, but let’s not talk about who should bear responsibility for it being broken in the first place.
And finally, a limited number of speakers engage in some form of admission—not of ‘guilt’, but of the presumably lesser evils of naivety (about the extent to which perverse incentives in the financial sector have bred deep cultures of corporate irresponsibility) and lack of vigour in tightening regulation. All stop well short of public contrition, though a few acknowledge and empathise with the extent of suffering borne by the ordinary citizens who have been the losers in the crisis.
In all, this pattern corresponds closely with the findings of other studies of blame management—namely, a pattern of ‘staged retreat’: the potential blamee tries to keep the discussion about blame as far away as possible from themselves, but as the pressure on them increases (because new facts become known, more people have become angry or credible other voices are starting to question their involvement, competence or intent), they retreat to less ideal but still potentially workable forms of blame avoidance (Bovens et al. 1999; Brändström and Kuipers 2003; Hood et al. 2007). It is important to note that none of the policymakers engaged in proactive acceptance of responsibility, forfeiting the option of ending up in the relatively benign ‘blame minimisation’ game type, in which early and forthright public acknowledgment of responsibility gets the blamee ‘off the hook’ in the media and parliamentary arenas (see Table 2.1; for empirical illustration, see Brändström et al. 2008).
This general pattern was punctuated by several differences of timing and emphasis. For example, Singaporean and European Commission leaders did not budge in their responsibility rhetoric; in contrast, UK policymakers, particularly Chancellor, Alistair Darling, eventually did engage in some acknowledgment of responsibility. What factors might have caused such differences? They are mainly contextual, underlining that there is truth in the cliché that where one stands depends on where one sits. On the basis of the case studies—and other than obvious factors such as personal beliefs and styles or being in versus outside government—we would nominate the following factors.
Salience of accountability pressures: lacking real media or legislative scrutiny in these matters, Singaporean and European Commission policymakers could afford to gloss over questions of responsibility.
Type of office held: much of the political heat of accounting for the crisis fell on the politicians and there were at times marked differences in the responsibility rhetoric of heads of government and finance ministers on the one hand, and bank governors on the other (only the retired US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, in a Congressional hearing in October 2008, came out with a highly publicised acknowledgment of responsibility). The bank governors, as bureaucrats, were able to concentrate more on diagnosing and managing the operational crisis. They therefore generally steered clear of statements that could lead others to question their past prudence, lest these might spill over into doubts about their present competence in crisis response.
Length of incumbency: obviously, policymakers such as UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, former New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clarke, and Irish Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, who had held an executive leadership position for several years before the occurrence of the crisis, were more at risk in discussions about responsibility than their counterparts such as Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, incoming New Zealand Prime Minister, John Key, and US President, Barack Obama (and their treasurers), who took office just before or in the middle of the crisis. The latter were far better able to credibly shift blame to others—notably, their predecessors. Some in effect presented themselves primarily as blamers, not blamees, with US Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, and Rudd the most conspicuous examples. Conversely, some opposition politicians during the crisis were muted in their criticism of government passivity in the face of a growing bubble that was waiting to burst only because they themselves had been in government in the years leading up to the meltdown. It shows that Table 2.1 ignores the crucial influence of temporal factors (and thus possible role changes and factors mediating media predispositions towards the responsibility rhetoric of various elite actors) in its prediction of the nature of crisis-induced blame games. Determining who blames and who accounts is not a matter of taking a snapshot view of a crisis; it instead requires understanding crises in terms of the unfolding of a much longer political scenario.
In the end, there was surprisingly little hardball politics of blaming going on during the period under study. Yes, the crisis became a prominent election issue in New Zealand, the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada. In Canada, however, the incumbents survived, whereas in New Zealand and the United States, one had the distinct impression that the loss of the incumbents (or their parties) was over-determined to begin with by a host of other factors.
Perhaps the immediate challenges of absorbing and taming the crisis were too overwhelming (and controversial). This suggests that blame still needs to be apportioned later—for example, in the context of the inevitable inquiries that are being announced in various countries at the time of writing. Perhaps blame was effectively privatised in this case, with impoverished account holders and investors chasing financial executives in the courts. Perhaps, however, there simply was not enough semantic space and political appetite left for pinpointing blame domestically for a fiasco that has widely become labelled as the global financial crisis. Anthropologists might be on the mark in observing that those who have been injured will always look for someone to blame; but if the victims are in their millions scattered across the planet, the more likely it is that the search will be fruitless. It is the ultimate ‘many hands’ problem: the more ‘global’ the crisis, the larger the number of hands that have helped bring it about and the easier it is for incumbent elites to successfully engage in blame-avoidance rhetoric, with blame ultimately evaporating rather than crystallising.