The discursive micro-politics of blame avoidance: unpacking the language of government blame games

policymakers often engage in blame avoidance behaviour that affects the ways in which they structure their organisations, adopt policies and operating routines, and present their work to the public. the linguistic aspects of such behaviour have received relatively little academic attention. in this paper, i seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. based on a multidisciplinary literature review, i show how the discursive study of policy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena. i provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. i suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated ‘language games’, policy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in policy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.