Who Gets the Blame? Public Responsibility Attributions for Labour Market Reforms Under EU Conditionality

The Euro crisis came with unprecedented EU influence on domestic policymaking. Many crisis countries implemented a similar mix of austerity measures and reforms under varying forms of EU conditionality. In this context, the EU should be a prime target for attributions of responsibility for the introduced measures in the public. Yet, it is unclear whether responsibility was indeed attributed predominantly to European Institutions in the crisis countries. In some countries, protests were directed against the EU institutions as well as the national governments, and many of these governments were severely punished at the ballots. In this paper I thus analyse what influences the direction of public responsibility attributions. Under what conditions are EU institutions the prime target of public responsibility attributions (PRA) for the austerity measures and reforms in the countries affected by some form of EU conditionality? When are PRAs primarily directed at national governments instead? I identify two factors that influence the direction of PRAs. First, the literature on responsibility attributions highlights the link between formal decision-making authority and responsibility judgements. When reforms are introduced under the formal conditionality that comes with financial assistance programmes, PRAs to the EU are more likely than under more implicit forms of influence. Second, the literature on blame avoidance proposes two strategies to manage domestic discontent: blame acceptance or blame shifting. When a government engages in active blame shifting to the EU, the latter may also be held responsible in the public. To test these conjectures, I conduct a content analysis of responsibility attributions for the labour market reforms introduced in Greece, Italy and Portugal. During the Euro crisis, all three countries introduced reforms that considerably changed provisions for employment protection, collective bargaining and unemployment benefits. They vary, however, with regard to the locus of the formal decision-making authority and governments’ political strategies. The paper contributes to scholarship on responsibility attributions in multilevel systems by investigating varying degrees of EU influence on national-level policymaking, and by shedding a light on the agency of domestic actors in shaping PRAs. What is more, looking at the consequences of increased EU influence on the domestic realm, I provide a link in the often-proclaimed causal chain between crisis politics in the Euro crisis and the observed decreasing support for the European project in the public.