Agni Poullikka* examines the factors affecting how Members of Parliament (MPs) in Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU) engage in responsibility management for recent economic crises, focusing on the Eurozone crisis and the economic consequences of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Drawing on the theoretical framework of blame and credit strategies, the author combines quantitative text analysis tools with hand coding to derive insights about attribution of responsibility to the EU.
Why should we care about this?
As a result of policy responses to recent crises, the scope and depth of policymaking at the EU level is increasing. Given the EU’s multilevel governance structure, responsibility for significant policy areas is fractured across different levels of governance and multiple institutions, with some of them being unelected. For instance, both national governments and the European Central Bank (ECB) are responsible for economic policymaking for Eurozone member countries. This can be problematic for the representative model of democracy, which posits that voters should be able to discern who are the decision-makers and then hold them accountable at the ballot box. Instead, the EU’s institutional complexity blurs the clarity of responsibility and creates incentives for elected actors, such as MPs, to obfuscate responsibility in relation to adverse situations. This is the research focus of this paper, which explores the factors affecting how MPs attribute responsibility to the EU for two recent economic crises; the Eurozone crisis (2008-2016) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022).
What is responsibility management?
To address this question, this paper focuses on a specific type of political communication, namely strategic communication to engage in responsibility management. The umbrella term ‘responsibility management’ captures presentational behaviours that correspond to either a blame or a credit strategy. A blame strategy is the act of attributing responsibility for something considered bad to some person or entity, whilst a credit strategy is the act of accepting responsibility for something bad and attempting to present it in a positive light by turning blame into credit (Hood, 2011).
I use this framework to inform my theoretical model, with the aim of deriving hypotheses about how institutional and preference-based factors affect the responsibility management of MPs and I aggregate the analysis to the party level. The underlying assumption is that when communicating about a negative situation, such as an economic crisis, MPs have a strategic motivation to maximise their gains at the next election. In other words, the way in which they attribute responsibility for the crisis is fuelled by their electoral incentives. These incentives can vary depending on a number of factors. This paper focuses on two. On the one hand, there are institutional factors such as Eurozone membership and whether there is a coalition or single-party government.
On the other hand, preference-based factors include a party’s political ideology, its predisposition towards the EU and whether it is in government or in opposition. Considering a preference-based factor, the paper expects that government parties engage in more credit strategies compared to opposition parties, regardless of their predisposition towards the EU. One explanation for this could be that even if a government party were Eurosceptic, it would still be interested in portraying the EU in a positive light because the government is involved in decision-making at the EU level through its role at the European Council.
How can we analyse responsibility management?
Given the theoretical focus on the political communication of MPs, the paper analyses textual data. The textual data consist of plenary session minutes of national parliaments in EU MS. For the Eurozone crisis, the countries covered are the following: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK). Given that the UK was an EU MS during the Eurozone crisis, it is included in the analysis. For the COVID-19 crisis, the countries are Belgium, Czech Republic, Spain, Denmark and Netherlands. This country selection allows for cross-national as well as cross-temporal comparisons between the two crises.
The methodological approach combines quantitative text analysis tools with hand coding. First, a subset of the data is created for one country, which includes only the time period of each crisis. Second, a dictionary of crisis-related terms is created and applied in order to select only the speeches that discuss the economic crisis. Third, the application of a regular expression dictionary of EU related terms selects sentences that refer to the EU (Rauh, 2015; Rauh and de Wilde, 2014; Hunter 2021). These sentences are more likely to include a responsibility attribution towards the EU. Fourth, a sentiment analysis is run, which can identify whether a sentence includes a blame (negative sentiment), or a credit strategy (positive sentiment). Fifth, hand coding is deployed to understand towards whom the negative or positive sentiment is directed. If that actor is EU-related, then the sentence is coded as an instance of blame or credit depending on the sentiment. This analysis is completed for all the countries in the dataset. Considered in tandem, the findings will explain how MPs assign responsibility to the EU and how institutional and preference-based factors affect this.
What are some findings about responsibility management?
To bring the discussion to life, Figures 1-3 present descriptive analyses about the responsibility management of the three main UK parties. The proportions correspond to the proportion of statements that were either a blame or a credit strategy directed towards the EU or towards the EU and other actors, out of the total statements that correspond to responsibility management. Whilst Labour was in government before 2010, the Conservatives were elected in power in 2010 and formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats until 2015. After winning the 2015 elections, the Conservatives formed a single-party government.
Figure1 reveals the findings for Labour, a left-wing party with favourable predisposition towards the EU. When the Labour party was in government, their communication strategies were characterised by credit, whereas when they were in opposition they switched to more blame strategies. This could indicate that the government-opposition dynamic supersedes their affinity towards the EU. In other words, parties that support the EU might still opt for blame strategies in an attempt to scapegoat the EU and the incumbent government, thereby increasing their chances at the ballot box in the next election.
Figure 2 demonstrates that overall the Conservatives, a right-wing party with Eurosceptic tendencies gave more blame rather than credit to the EU. Nevertheless, after coming to power in 2010, they increased their credit towards the EU compared to earlier years. This could confirm the expectation that when parties are in government they are more likely to credit the EU, regardless of their predisposition towards it. Lastly, Figure 3 looks at the Liberal Democrats, a liberal Europhile party. After becoming part of the governing coalition in 2010, they adopted an approach of neither blaming nor crediting the EU, as evidenced by the low values in Figure 3. This could be interpreted as an attempt of blame avoidance as they distance themselves from the topic and avoid discussing it in an emotive way. This strategy would enable them to neither compromise their preference towards the EU nor disappoint their coalition partners.
Concluding remarks
This paper seeks to examine responsibility management for economic crises in the EU. The preliminary findings from the UK lend some support to the argument that parties blame and credit the EU with strategic considerations derived from institutional and preference-based factors in mind. The paper will proceed to explore these trends for other EU MS, with the aim of forming a comprehensive understanding of how MPs attribute responsibility to the EU for economic crises. In so doing, it can contribute to debates on the EU’s democratic accountability in policymaking and academic circles.
*Agni is a PhD Researcher at the Department of International Politics at City, University of London. Her research spans several topics in European political economy, focusing on economic crises and political communication. This blog post is based on a paper delivered at the PSA Parliaments Conference 2022.
References
Hood, C. (2011). The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy and Self-preservation in Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hunter, T. (2021). Home Style: Governments, Parties, and the Domestic Presentation of European Integration. PhD Dissertation for the London School of Economics European Institute.
Rauh, C. and De Wilde, P. (2018). The Opposition Deficit in EU Accountability: Evidence from over 20 Years of Plenary Debate in Four Member States. European Journal of Political Research, 57(01), 194-216.
Rauh, C. (2015). Communicating Supranational Governance? The Salience of EU Affairs in the German Bundestag, 1991–2013. European Union Politics, 16(01), 116–138.
