The Risk Game and the Blame Game *

By Christopher C. Hood. Government and Opposition, 2002

613 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/062ede690bdc9e09499197ab7738644ca3b23b72

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Citations in the corpus

What happens when transparency meets blame-avoidance? (2007, background): “Agency strategies can be defined as attempts by officeholders or institutions to avoid or limit blame by the way that formal responsibility, competency or jurisdiction is allocated among institutions and officeholders (Hood 2002: 16).”
Evaluating the Expectations Disconfirmation and Expectations Anchoring Approaches to Citizen Satisfaction with Local Public Services (2007, background): “Strategies to lower expectations could include explaining to local publics about difficulties in service provision such as problematic socioeconomic conditions or budget and other constrains imposed by outside actors such as central government (Hood 2002; James 2004).”
Risk and risk management in management accounting and control (2013, background): “Further side effects include blame avoidance (Hood, 2002), fear of sanctions, legalization and the re-drawing of (organizational) boundaries that arguably may lead to a re-enforcing of the ‘box ticking’ culture.”
Critical trust: understanding lay perceptions of health and safety risk regulation (2004, background): “Such inferences about organisations are one means by which people navigate an inherently uncertain and complex world, and we should not forget too that it is through blaming that people try to hold others to account (Douglas 1992; Hood 2002).”
The UK Core Executive's Use of Public Service Agreements as a Tool of Governance (2004, background): “…of PSAs would involve meeting targets, other strategies for handling blame are suggested, including managing presentation of performance to avoid blame, blame shifting between groups in the system and changing policies or priorities to avoid the risk of blame (see Ellis, 1994, Hood 2000; 2002).”
New Public Management: The Cruellest Invention of the Human Spirit?1 (2009, background): “The reliance on this ‘risk assurance industry’ by public managers can also be seen as a defensive response by public service managers to avoid the blame culture associated with the public sector, especially the performance management regime (Hood, 2002; Hood and Rothstein, 2001).”
Why are policy innovations rare and so often negative? Blame avoidance and problem denial in climate change policy-making (2014, neutral): “…policy aims The specific types of governing instruments to be used to address programme level objectives The specific ‘settings’ of policy tools required to attain policy targets Source: Howlett and Cashore (2009). on the concept of blame-avoidance in government (Weaver, 1989; Hood, 2002, 2010a).”
Blame Games and Climate Change: Accountability, Multi-Level Governance and Carbon Management (2015, background): “Hood, C. (2010) The Blame Game (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).”
The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships (2005, background): “The playwright Christopher Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus in 1592.”
Anticipatory and reactive forms of blame avoidance: of foxes and lions (2016, background): “Sometimes, subordinates or officeholders working in adjacent policy areas may try to oppose the delegation or reshuffling of responsibilities (Hood, 2002).”
The lessons of failure: learning and blame avoidance in public policy-making (2012, background): “It is the essence of the blame-avoidance literature that such attributions of blame are thought to have significant electoral or legitimation consequences for all policy participants and thus to be a key subject of policy learning (Flynn, 2011; Hood, 2002, 2007, 2010; Weaver, 1986).”