Blame Avoidance in the Eurozone Crisis – Debating Responsibility Among Greek and German Parties, 2009 – 2016

Since 2009, the crisis in the Eurozone has shaken party systems in Europe. The public allocation of responsibility is crucial to explain this changing political space. As publicly elected actors, party strategies of blame avoidance and blame shifting gain importance in times of crisis.

In this paper, we compare strategies of blame avoidance and blaming patterns for Greek and German parties between 2009 and 2016. We assess two main factors that influence the way in which parties try to distract responsibility and the directions of (national and Europeanized) blame shifting in the public realm: holding government vs. opposition and traditional party preferences. Research about responsibility allocation in times of welfare state reforms has shown that electoral punishment is stronger if government policies are opposed to traditional party preferences and hence, we expect stronger blame-avoiding incentives.

Next to inter-party conflicts, we assess the level of intra-party conflicts and party discipline. Overall, the analysis helps to understand party strategies of blame avoidance in times of crisis and moreover, it points to implications for the restructuration of party conflicts in Greece and Germany along national and transnational lines.

The paper is based on a standardized content analysis of German and Greek newspapers conducted in the Greek-German research project GGCRISI resulting in several thousand attributions of responsibility from party politicians in the public debate on the Eurozone crisis between September 2009 and March 2016.