BIO342H5 Study Guide - Final Guide: Ontario Liberal Party, George Wootten
Document Summary
An exploration into the efficacy of blame avoidance strategies. There is an emerging literature that examines the role that blame avoidance strategies play in helping politicians/governments minimize the amount political damage associated with contentious and potentially unpopular decisions they make (weaver 1986; hood 2011; vis and. Existing scholarship points to multiple strategies open to governments in their efforts to avoid blame, including - but not limited to - the use of excuses and justifications (mcgraw 1990), obfuscation (lindbom 2001, 2007), reframing the issue (cox. 2001; elemund-praesteker and emmenegger 2012), denials (garcia 2011), reducing the perceived offensiveness of decisions (benoit and henson 2009), diffusing blame or deflecting blame (pal and weaver 2003), concessions and apologies (benoit 1995). Interestingly, despite the relatively high level of scholarly interest in blame avoidance, no one has figured a way to test the relative success or failure of blame avoidance strategies in politics (hood 2011, 159).
