Blame Avoidance in the EU: How Delegation Matters

The shift from the ‘permissive consensus’ to the ‘constraining dissensus’ in the European Union (EU) has increased the electoral stakes of EU policymaking, which brings into focus EU member states governments’ ability to avoid blame for contested EU policies. We argue that different modes of delegation provide governments with different blame avoidance opportunities. While delegation to intergovernmental EU actors offers no blame avoidance opportunities, delegation to supranational EU agents effectively allows for blame shifting, whereas delegation to non-EU actors depoliticizes a contested issue. Two case studies of contested EU policies in the financial and the migration crisis corroborate the plausibility of our argument. Our findings imply that EU governments possess strong incentives to bypass democratic accountability by governing through independent agents. While politically expedient, this strategy strains the EU’s already brittle democratic legitimacy.