The Politics of Blame Avoidance: Why Bold Visions Often Fall Short

A Look at the Barriers to Transformative Policy

Happy Wednesday! Today, I want to explore one of the key tensions in much of what I argue - the politics of blame avoidance. I think it's crucial to understand this if we want to be engaged in building a more inclusive and innovative Canada, because it has a deep impact on how that will happen. This will be the first half of a two-part series, which I will pick up again on Monday with some reflections on the state of policy work in Canada and the role of individuals and organizations outside of government in informing and actively shaping policy.

First, though, on a very related topic, I recently joined

Iain Montgomery

for a conversation on public policy for the

Challenger Cities

podcast and newsletter. It was a super interesting chat that covered a lot of ground, including some topics I’ll dive deeper into here today. You can check it out here:

Challenger Cities EP26: The Policy Playbook for Challenger Cities with Tom Goldsmith

The Logic of Blame Avoidance: Understanding Voter Perceptions and Political Responses

Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash

Time and time again in this newsletter, I’ve made the case that we need to articulate a vision for Canada’s economy and society. As I set out in the introduction to my three essays on an Agenda for an Inclusive and Innovative Canada:

I feel it is important to have this vision to provide intellectual scaffolding for policymaking. We live in a complex world with complex challenges, and any policy choice will come with trade-offs. A coherent vision helps provide the guide rails to understand and make those choices across multiple interlocking policy domains.

Given the importance of making these trade-offs if we are to tackle those complex challenges, I believe we need political leaders who recognize the moment we are in and articulate a positive vision of how to respond.

Yet, I don’t think we have that right now, and I don’t hold out a great deal of hope that any of the candidates for Prime Minister right now would deliver it.

I think it's important to explore why that is the case. It would be very easy to just shout into the void on this, making an argument that we need that visionary leadership while never really probing why it isn’t happening or how we might change things. But I don’t have much interest in doing that and want to go deeper into the problem.

For this, my starting point is R. Kent Weaver’s 1986 article “The Politics of Blame Avoidance.” Cited almost 3000 times, Weaver sets out a foundational argument of how “when push comes to shove, most officeholders seek above all not to maximize the credit they receive but to minimize blame.”