The Art of Doing Nothing – Non-Compliance as a Blame Avoidance Strategy

International organizations (IOs) have come to play an important role national policy-making. This leads to an increasingly common predicament for national governments. As policy-making authority is pooled at or delegated to international organizations (IO), governments are constrained in their responsiveness to the electorate. Compliance with supranational decisions can put national governments in the uncomfortable position of having to implement policies that are unpopular in the public. How can governments avoid blame for unpopular supranational policies and communicate domestically that they are responsive? We argue that in the context of multilevel policy-making, (temporary) non-compliance can be employed as a blame avoidance strategy. When national governments face the task of implementing unpopular policies decided at the supranational level, they face the risk of being blamed by domestic audiences. Non-compliance offers national governments an opportunity to claim credit for representing domestic interests. What is more, national governments can credibly engage in blame shifting to supranational actors by passing the buck of policy implementation to the organization which has to enforce policy implementation. The European Union is arguably the most sophisticated international organization and provides ample examples to elucidate this phenomenon. We illustrate our argument by tracing the temporary non-compliance of Italy’s populist government with the EU’s stability criteria from mid-2018 through July 2019. We analyse the political communication of the Italian government and European Institutions, as well as the public responsibility attributions in Italian newspapers to show that rather than just a “chicken games gone wrong”, where a member state government dramatically overestimated its bargaining power, non-compliance can be characterized as an exercise in blame avoidance. While the existing literature on responsibility attributions has highlighted the attribution of blame to the European level in cases of EU implementation, we thus show that non-compliance can serve as a second pathway to blaming “Brussels”.