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Why would a politician ever want to be blamed? Under what contextual conditions might blame-seeking behaviour emerge as a rational strategy? What tactics, tools and strategies might they deploy? Where is the empirical evidence of blame-seeking in action and why does it matter? These are the questions this article engages with as it challenges the long-standing ‘self-evident truth’ within political science that blame-is-bad. We argue that a new ‘blame game’ has emerged in which blame generation is deployed not solely to taint opponents but also to demonstrate the blame-seeker’s willingness to challenge convention, break the rules, or side with the marginalized. In a broader context characterized by democratic dissatisfaction, anti-political sentiment and affective polarization, we suggest that blame-seeking assumes a powerful symbolic and performative dimension. Antagonizing certain sections of society and then harnessing the backlash provides a powerful political strategy which challenges traditional scholarly assumptions about credit and blame existing in a zero-sum relationship. We illustrate these arguments using the case of Boris Johnson’s rise to the British premiership. A focus on blame-seeking, we suggest, expands our understanding of what politicians say and do to achieve their goals in polarized political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second argument is that politicians are well aware of the fact that crisis management is a risky affair and will therefore seek to utilise a number of blame-avoidance and self-preservation strategies. A second way in which Hood's framework helps focus attention on the pandemic-democracy link, in general, and blame, in particular, is through the identification of specific blame-avoidance strategies. Graph Going MAD We have already seen how previous pandemics have generally been viewed through the lens of policy failures which, in turn, explains why politicians engage in blame-avoidance behaviours. [Extracted from the article]