Blame games and democratic responsiveness

The link between opinion and policy is central to the functioning of representative democracy. Democracies are responsive to their citizens' preferences if citizens can influence governments' policy output. This article conceptualizes political blame games about policy controversies as venues of democratic responsiveness to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the opinion-policy link in policy-heavy, conflictual democracies. The article shows how political actors convert public feedback to a policy controversy into blame game interactions, which in turn lead to political and policy responses by the government. A comparative-historical analysis of nine blame games in the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland reveals how institutions structure blame game interactions, and thus influence a political system's responsiveness during blame games. The analysis suggests that an important, yet neglected, expression of democratic quality of political systems is their ability to translate blame game interactions into policy responses. The study of blame games as venues of democratic responsiveness thus provides a new conceptual tool for assessing the health of representative democracies in more conflictual times

Chapter 21 Blame Games

Following a crisis, questions are raised about the event itself, its causes, and its consequences. People wonder how this could have happened and whether it could have been prevented. Depending on how the debate evolves, a blame game will ensue: actors will be held accountable for what happened, and these actors will respond to that blame in various ways. This chapter describes how blame games evolve, who will be blamed, how much blame these actors can expect to receive, and how framing plays a role throughout the blame game. Moreover, particular attention is paid to multilevel blame games as there has been a recent increase in interest in this topic, either through investigating this phenomenon or by pointing out its relevance. This chapter defines and describes what multilevel blame games are while listing future avenues of research

The EEAS and the eastern partnership: let the blame game stop

In the first year and a half of its existence, the EEAS and its head have become the target of extensive criticism for the shortcomings of EU foreign policy; shortcomings that in fact date back to the creation of the European Union. The EU’s diplomatic service has been blamed variously for ‘lacking clarity,’ ‘acting too slowly’ and ‘being unable to bridge the institutional divide’. In this Commentary author Hrant Kostanyan argues that the EEAS’ discretionary power in the Eastern Partnership multilateral framework is restricted by the decision-making procedures between a wide range of stakeholders: the member states and the partner countries, as well as by the EU institutions, international organisations and the Civil Society Forum. Since this decision-making process places a substantial number of brakes on the discretionary power of the EEAS, any responsible analysis or critique of the service should take these constraints into consideration. Ultimately, the EEAS is only able to craft EU foreign policy insofar as it is allowed to do so

The Blame Game: Performance Analysis of Speaker Diarization System Components

In this paper we discuss the performance analysis of a speaker diarization system similar to the system that was submitted by ICSI at the NIST RT06s evaluation benchmark. The analysis that is based on a series of oracle experiments, provides a good understanding of the performance of each system component on a test set of twelve conference meetings used in previous NIST benchmarks. Our analysis shows that the speech activity detection component contributes most to the total diarization error rate (23%). The lack of ability to model verlapping speech is also a large source of errors (22%) followed by the component that creates the initial system models (15%)

Penn State and the Blame Game

It has now been two months since scandal rolled into the Happy Valley, with the news that Jerry Sandusky has been charged with 52 counts of child molestation. Much is still uncertain and yet the university, the surrounding community, and the nation as a whole remains fixated on the question of responsibility. In particular, does Penn State bear responsibility for any of the alleged acts of abuse and, if so, on what grounds? If the institution does bear responsibility, ought we to transmit that responsibility to members of the Penn State community? To which members? And what measures should Penn State undertake in response? We address each of these questions in turn

The Name Game as Blame Game: The Domodedovo Terrorist Bombing

The author discusses the relevance of blame in the context of terrorism