Discursive strategies of blame avoidance in government: A framework for analysis

Introduction

The concept of blame has attracted a lot of academic attention (Coates and Tognazzini, 2013; McKenna, 2012; Malle et al., 2014; Scanlon, 2008; Sher, 2006; Tilly, 2008). Some scholars of politics, organisation and public administration have particularly emphasised the need to study the practices and implications of blame avoidance in institutional contexts and political life. For instance, Weaver (1986) notes that if politicians want to be re-elected they have to ‘be at least as interested in avoiding blame for (perceived or real) losses that they either imposed or acquiesced in as they are in “claiming credit” for benefits they have granted’ (p. 372). Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) assert that ‘an organisation is defined by how it handles blame and punishment’ (p. 131). Hood (2011) argues that regarding the ‘idea of blame avoidance as a political and bureaucratic imperative’ (p. 24) helps us make sense of organisations’ and officeholders’ behaviour.

It is well known that receiving blame may ruin personal or organisational reputation and result in the loss of power, finances and job security for particular officeholders (Allern and Pollack, 2012; Boin et al., 2005; Castells, 2009; Thompson, 2000). Policy makers are thus tempted to apply strategies of blame avoidance which permeate administrative structures, operations and language use (Hood, 2011; Weaver, 1986). Blame-related defensive practices by government insiders can, however, have broader societal implications. They may derail, obstruct or prevent public debates over certain policy issues, alter political agendas and alliances, legitimate some actors and disempower/delegitimise others. And certain ways of warding off blame may either encourage or discourage social learning, that is, the processes by which people both inside and outside of government make sense of each other’s perspectives and attitudes, gain moral insight and reproduce shared meaning.

Linguistic aspects of how governments avoid blame are yet to be studied in great detail. The main thrust of my argument in this article is that discourse analysts need a more sophisticated understanding of blame avoidance as a dominant and frequent (if only implicit) theme of executive government communication. Within the field of discourse studies, I am guided by and build upon the overall methodological framework of the discourse-historical approach which has been particularly designed for dissecting and demystifying power relations in political life in terms of discursive strategies of self- and other-presentation (see Reisigl and Wodak, 2001, 2009; Wodak, 2011).

I present my argument in three steps. I first briefly review some linguistic approaches and analytic tools which are useful for describing various aspects of blame avoidance in institutional settings: ways of arguing, framing, denying, representing social actors and actions, legitimising and manipulating (social) cognition. However, taken separately, these approaches may lack the interpretive power to account for the large variety of possible moves that characterise government-related blame games. Therefore, second, I summarise a more specific public administration approach to blame avoidance as proposed by Hood (2011). And finally, I synthesise all the previous approaches into a new, more comprehensive heuristic model – one that discourse analysts will be able to use to detect and interpret typical macroconversational practices adopted by officeholders in the circumstances of blame risk to achieve the goal of positive self-presentation.

I draw my examples mainly from texts produced by the government officeholders of the United Kingdom between 2008 and 2013. I use these to demonstrate how my framework could be applied to explicate discursive blame avoidance in several typical genres of governance: a newspaper article by a minister, a news release by a government office, a televised statement of a minister and a live ministerial press conference. All the examples are set against the historical backdrop of the financial crisis that developed in the United Kingdom since 2007. This backdrop is salient because blaming and blame avoidance are essential building blocks of public narratives about crises.

Linguistic approaches to blame avoidance

Several discourse analysts and cognitive linguists have explicated instances and means of blaming and blame avoidance in political and bureaucratic communication in particular. As a good general starting point, Wodak (2006a) provides a concise overview of linguistic/pragmatic approaches to blaming and its frequent complementary speech act, denying. Blaming as a constitutive feature of conflict talk can be analysed by using a variety of methodologies suitable to the particular genre and context. These approaches include, for instance, speech act theory, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, argumentation analysis and rhetoric.

In political debates and persuasive discourses, blaming and denying are strategically planned and serve positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. Thus, this domain is of particular interest to discourse and argumentation analysts, who focus on strategies of blaming and denying and argumentative moves in conflict talk (see Wodak, 2006a: 59–61).

Public administration approach to blame avoidance

Hood (2011: 18) provides an insightful classification of ‘presentational’ blame avoidance strategies that are characteristic to public administration. ⁵ These involve using arguments for limiting blame (excuses) or turning blame into credit (justifications) and other methods of influencing public impressions. These strategies are based on the assumption that presentational activity will limit or deflect rather than exacerbate or attract blame. He lists the following strategies.

Importantly, Hood discusses the possible positive and negative societal effects of the use of presentational strategies by government institutions. He argues that the approaches based on avoiding public discussion could be seen normatively as detrimental:

A key test of the positivity or otherwise of presentational blame-avoidance strategy is how far it serves to engage the citizenry in serious argument about the merits of policy or operational choices to be made by officeholders and organisations, and clarifies where fault lies after allegations of avoidable losses have been made … So on that criterion we can argue that winning-the-argument approaches are broadly positive, but changing-the-subject and low-profile approaches (such as diversion tactics, nonengagement, or backdoor pressures on media) are negative. (Hood, 2011: 174–175)

Hood also reminds us that there are other kinds of blame avoidance strategies beyond the ‘presentational’ ones listed above: officeholders may preemptively distribute formal responsibility among each other and/or choose particular operating routines that make it easier to shift blame or limit personal blame risk if something bad happens.

Embracing the blame avoidance framework

Hood’s blame avoidance typology, although not claiming comprehensiveness, seems to be useful for gaining a broader insight into risk aversion practices in executive government contexts. The analytic tools embedded in the discourse-historical approach, however, can be used to accomplish a more exhaustive explication of a variety of linguistic (or rhetorical or argumentative) means and micro-processes by which blame is framed, admitted, countered or shifted by government communicators.

For instance, after identifying linguistic evidence of hidden or backgrounded agency in a government-produced text and taking into account the specific context of situation, as well as the history of the text and the institution, an analyst can interpret the particular discursive choice in terms of whether or not it may function as a blame avoidance device in a public administration organisation – and in which ways.

In what follows, I am working abductively towards bringing these two kinds of knowledge together into a single heuristic model: typical macro-level choices of administrative blame avoidance, on the one hand, and the corresponding argumentative moves (fallacies, topoi, violations of the pragma-dialectical rules), frames, types of denial, ways of representing actors and actions, typical legitimations and attempts of cognitive manipulation, on the other hand. I describe the linguistic characteristics of the general discursive choices of blame avoidance in turn together with concrete textual examples drawn mainly from my UK government communication data set. My overall heuristic model of interpreting discursive blame avoidance strategies in government is presented in the form of a matrix in Appendix 1.

Total problem denial is realised discursively as denying – ‘This has never happened’ or ‘We did not do it’ (act-denial). The possible blame taker may provide an inverted account of blame maker’s original accusation (e.g. ‘We helped X’ in response to ‘You failed to help X’). In addition, explanations may be given which involve distorting or disregarding opponents’ original claims (argumentative fallacy called ‘straw man’), giving an impression that there is nothing to discuss as everything is self-evident (evading the burden of proof), using unclear, ambiguous or unfamiliar language (fallacy of unclarity, fallacy of ambiguity) and attempts to rewrite history (manipulating Episodic Memory). Such a denial could be expected to exclude representations of victims and harmful acts and to use reference to the higher status of the blame taker as a guarantee of the truthfulness of the denial (authority legitimisation).

To illustrate how a relatively complex instance of total problem denial may be interpreted within my framework, I analyse an extract from the UK Cabinet Office’s (2012) news release in response to an investigative story on government overspending published in The Times on 9 January 2012. The story, entitled ‘Whitehall waste: the £31 billion cost of failure’, was significant because it constituted a well-grounded (based on the National Audit Office data) blame attack by a major newspaper on the government on an issue that was at the time at the core of its programme and thus also its collective identity. The story provoked the government to make an unusual move and issue a carefully crafted official response in the form of a Cabinet Office news release, entitled ‘Eradicating waste in Whitehall saves £3.75 billion’, on 11 January 2012. The news release contained a statement by Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude. Here are the first three sentences from his statement:

1 When we arrived in government we pledged to be ruthless in hunting down and

2 eradicating waste in Whitehall and that is precisely what we have done.

3 Just in the first ten months to last March we saved £3.75 billion – equivalent to twice

4 the budget of the Foreign Office, or to funding 200,000 nurses.

5 This has not been easy; spending hours renegotiating contracts, tackling vested

6 interests and large suppliers and cutting back on spend on consultants and advertising

7 does not make for glamorous or headline grabbing work.

In lines 1–2, the Minister for the Cabinet Office uses the argumentative strategy of parading one’s own qualities (argumentum ad verecundiam) by claiming that the government has fulfilled its pledge. Importantly, this sentence also implies a total act-denial: the Minister states that the government has ‘eradicated waste’, that is, he and his colleagues have done the opposite of ‘wasting’. The Minister represents wasting not as an action carried out by his fellow officeholders but as a nominalised entity: ‘waste in Whitehall’. Moreover, he diffuses blame by portraying the government metaphorically as a ‘container’ (‘when we arrived in government …’) rather than a specific group of human actors who could be held responsible. He frames ‘waste’ as a Villain (or perhaps as some kind of a dangerous wild animal) and the government as a Hero (perhaps a gunman) who ‘hunts it down’ and ‘eradicates’ it.

In lines 3–4, the Minister backs up his claim by using a particular conclusion rule, topos of numbers, by suggesting that a given statistical figure (£3.75 billion allegedly saved in 10 months) serves as a proof that the government has not wasted money and should not be blamed. However, the Minister does not directly counter the central accusatory claim put forward by The Times that ‘more than £31 billion of taxpayers’ money has been wasted across government departments in the past two years’. Thus, he may be seen as committing a ‘straw man’ fallacy and violating a pragma-dialectical rule of reasonable discussion that requires the debater to use correct reference to previous discourse by the antagonist.

In lines 5–7, the Minister represents government’s activities at a high level of abstractness (‘renegotiating contracts’, ‘tackling vested interests’, ‘cutting back on spend’), thereby making it more difficult to understand the exact nature of the activities. This, in turn, may evoke a sense of mystery and awe among his audiences and therefore function as a kind of appeal to authority. In addition, he casts the government as a selfless Hero by claiming that the work of the government ‘has not been easy’ or ‘glamorous’.

Excuses involve admitting the harm or loss – at least partially – often accompanied by mitigation (‘We acknowledge that there seems to be a minor problem’) and giving possible reasons or explanations for the blameworthy situation. These explanations may play on the audience’s emotions, especially their feelings of compassion (argumentum ad populum, argumentum ad misericordiam), for instance, by claiming that ‘events were beyond our control’, or, that ‘these were unforeseeable circumstances’, or claiming ignorance and victim hood as someone suffering from an unfortunate lack of relevant information (‘no one told me …’), possibly evoking the Bad Apple frame.

While admitting that harm has been done, excuses may involve various types of denial: ‘It was an accident’ (control-denial), ‘You have misunderstood us’ (intention-denial), ‘We did not do that, in order to cause this …’ (goal-denial). Officeholders may attempt to obscure agency (‘It appears that some damage has been caused’) and impersonalise the victims (‘This country suffers from …’). Excuses do not involve explicit expressions of the acceptance of blame and are thus clearly distinct from apologies (for some characteristics of political apologies, see Harris et al., 2006).

To illustrate an analysis of an excuse, I use a short extract from a prominent newspaper article that came out at a time when the recent financial crisis in the United Kingdom became most acute. On 8 October 2008, the UK government announced a major package to support the banking sector, up to an aggregate total of £500 billion in loans and guarantees. Two days later, Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Gordon Brown published an article titled ‘We must lead the world to financial stability’ in The Times, where he justified the bank rescue plan of his government, but also argued that his government cannot take full responsibility for solving the crisis in the United Kingdom – and thus should not be blamed. Brown writes,

1 When I became Prime Minister I did not expect to make the decision,

2 along with Alistair Darling,

3 for the Government to offer to take stakes in our high street banks,

4 just as nobody could have anticipated the action taken in America.

Here, Brown’s argumentative shortcut to concluding that the UK government should not be blamed could be called topos of ignorance and explicated as follows: ‘If a threat is unforeseeable, then those who try to contain the threat with whatever means should not be held responsible’. Brown uses ad populum argumentation in line 4 by claiming that ‘nobody’ could have predicted the need to rescue high street banks in the United Kingdom and United States. He somewhat diffuses possible personal blame by mentioning one of the members of his Cabinet, Alistair Darling (line 2), who was responsible for economic and financial matters of his government, and referring to ‘America’ as another country where the government had supposedly taken similar actions. Brown thus realises his excuse mainly by representing the financial troubles in the United Kingdom as completely unforeseeable and beyond his complete control.

Justifications essentially involve positive self-presentation by trying to turn blame into credit: ‘What the media describes as a failure is actually a major victory’ or ‘We had to make some difficult decisions which will lead to gains in the future’. The related argumentation may be based on parading one’s own qualities (argumentum ad verecundiam), playing on the audience’s emotions (argumentum ad populum) and the use of inappropriate argumentation schemes or the incorrect application of argumentation schemes (e.g. false analogies; post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy). Moreover, possible blame takers may evoke a ‘Rescue narrative’ frame and cast themselves within that frame as Heroes or Helpers.

Justifications may include various types of denial, apparently with an exception of control-denial: the blame taker usually claims responsibility for the actions or events that are presented as positive. Still, the blame takers may attempt to obscure agency and to present the victims as winners (‘The economy cannot be fixed overnight but we will restore optimism and hope’). Justifications could also make use of the full range of legitimations, based on authority (‘We proceeded according to the law adopted by the Parliament’), moral evaluation (‘Our actions are based on Britain’s values’), rationalisation (‘This helps to get our economy back on its feet’) and mythopoesis (e.g. telling a cautionary story what could have happened if a particular decision had not been made).

To illustrate how justifications could be analysed within this blame avoidance framework, I use another extract from the same Prime Minister BGordon rown’s (2008) article (published in The Times on 10 October 2008) where he justified the bank rescue plan of his government. Here are the first three sentences from his article:

1 The banking system is fundamental to everything we do.

2 Every family and every business in Britain depends upon it.

3 That is why, when threatened by the global financial turmoil

4 that started in America and has now spread across the world,

5 we in Britain took action to secure our banks and financial system.

In terms of argumentation, Brown presents government’s decision to support banks as unquestionably necessary, using field-dependent warrants that are backed up by the presumedly common knowledge that ‘the banking system is fundamental to everything we do’ (line 1). I suggest that the specific warrants in use here may be called the topos of threat to the banks (‘if banks have problems, then it poses a threat to everybody and one should do something to secure the banks’) and the topos of global threat (‘if threats to everybody emerge, then the government should do something to protect the people against them’).

In terms of representation, Brown describes banks as influential agents that are central to and essentially ‘good’ for the society as a whole. He uses ‘banking’ as a general term; no distinction is made between banks acting within real economy (e.g. financial intermediation, insurance) and banks engaged in speculative/fictitious transactions. ‘Global financial turmoil’ is represented as an agent that threatens the United Kingdom (line 3). In terms of framing, such representation implies that the people and the banks in the United Kingdom should be seen as victims of that (abstract) turmoil. ‘America’ is referred to as the origin of the crisis, thus externalising the cause of the crisis (line 4). ‘Global’ and ‘spread across the world’ are used to suggest that the problems are universal and not specific to the United Kingdom. The use of ‘we in Britain’ (line 5) evokes a comparison or opposition between the United Kingdom and (supposedly) all the other countries in the world.

Thus, from the outset, Brown establishes a typical dramatic frame that implies that there is a Villain (global financial turmoil from America) who threatens the Victims (families, businesses, and banks in the United Kingdom) and a Hero (UK government) who takes action to defend the Victims. This frame (or dramatic plot) is clearly in service of the positive self-presentation of the government and used to mitigate possible blame for either causing or not sufficiently alleviating the financial crisis.

Problem denial + counter-attack may involve justifications or excuses (as described above) accompanied by negative other-presentation. The argumentation could be based on victim–victimiser reversal (trajectio in alium), discrediting the opponent (argumentum ad hominem), threatening the opponent (argumentum ad baculum) and symptomatic argumentation applied to shift blame (e.g. post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy). Blame takers could try to relativise and trivialise the problem through the use of (possibly fallacious) comparisons or equating strategies: ‘This is how all governments have dealt with the issue’ or ‘Yes, we made a mistake, but other institutions failed, too’. ⁶ Officeholders may try to cast themselves as Victims within a ‘Rescue narrative’ frame by claiming that their (possibly blameworthy) action serves the goal of self-defence and pointing a blaming finger at some outside actor as a Villain. Also, the Bad Apple frame may be evoked by referring to an alleged villain within the organisation.

All types of denial could be used, including the strongest forms: blaming the victim and victim–victimiser reversal. Nomination and predication are used strategically for constructing the blame makers as an outgroup and for attaching negative attributions to them (‘We are victims of the negatively biased media coverage’). Systematic re-attribution of responsibility of actions in officeholders’ interest can be interpreted as an attempt to manipulate an audience’s episodic memory.

To illustrate how to analyse instances where problem denial is put in action in conjunction with negative other-presentation, I examine another extract from the UK Cabinet Office’s news release in response to the article entitled ‘Whitehall waste: the £31 billion cost of failure’. In his statement, Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude says,

1 And I am not alone in highlighting all the good work we have done so far;

2 the Public Accounts Committee recently recognised and welcomed

3 our transparent approach to savings.

4 Meanwhile other countries, especially in troubled Europe,

5 are now looking to us for how this is done.

In lines 1–3, the Minister uses ad populum argumentation and authority legitimation in service of positive self-presentation of the government. He supports the position that the government should be praised (or at least not blamed) for its financial conduct by claiming that a collective actor who apparently holds high status in society – a parliamentary committee – has given the government a positive evaluation. In terms of representation, Maude nominalises government’s action: ‘our transparent approach to savings’ (line 3). This nominalised construction is remarkable for its ambivalence. On the one hand, it presupposes that the government is acting transparently and is saving money – both of which are supposedly regarded as worthy of public praise rather than blame. On the other hand, it is sufficiently vague to permit an opposite interpretation: one could ‘have a transparent approach to savings’ but actually not save any money.

In lines 4–5, the Minister juxtaposes the actions of the UK government with those of the other countries, evoking an ‘Us versus Them’ opposition. The suggestion that other governments regard the United Kingdom as a positive example (or perhaps a mentor or a role model) is not supported by any data – it ultimately relies on a presumption that his audience is likely to agree with statements that reaffirm positive ingroup feelings. The perceived opposition is intensified by negative other-presentation: ‘troubled Europe’ (line 4) is a salient linguistic construction that is based upon a presumption that the audience regards ‘Europe’ as an outgroup (i.e. that the UK citizens do not belong to ‘Europe’) and also implies that the United Kingdom is not financially ‘troubled’ (problem denial). This kind of discursive triggering of group polarisation may be regarded as manipulative, if it is carried out systematically with the purpose of deflecting blame for possible financial misconduct of the government.

Drawing a line is realised as a quick acknowledgement of the problem (‘Mistakes have been made’) and a possibly preemptive apology, sometimes accompanied by more or less explicit positive self-presentation (‘Unlike many other leaders, I am willing to acknowledge my mistakes. I apologise’.).

By apologising quickly, the officeholder(s) may try to avoid further discussion, thus escaping the obligation to give reasons for their blameworthy action (the fallacy of evading the burden of proof). The arguments used in conjunction with the apology may be chosen to play on the audience’s emotions (argumentum ad populum) and contain claims which are irrelevant to the topic under discussion (ignoratio elenchi). This choice can be regarded as manipulative if it is calculated to give an appearance of moral superiority, honesty and sincerity, thus possibly disarming critics.

An attempt to draw a line may be illustrated by a recorded broadcast statement by Nick Clegg (2012), Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat Party leader, published on YouTube on 19 September 2012 and aired on television in the United Kingdom later that month. Clegg’s statement contained an apology for not keeping his party’s pre-2010 election promise to oppose increasing university tuition fees. This cannot be strictly regarded as apologising early or preemptively because the controversial decision to raise the maximum university tuition fees in England from £3375 to £9000 per year was backed by the members of the UK parliament (including Nick Clegg and 27 other Liberal Democrats) already in December 2010. However, the fees were actually increased from September 2012 and Clegg may have tried to use that occasion as an opportunity to symbolically ‘win back trust’ of some disappointed citizens by seemingly leaving his blameworthy deeds behind and moving on. Here is an extract from Clegg’s statement:

1 I shouldn’t have committed to a policy that was so expensive

2 when there was no money around.

3 Not least when the most likely way we’d end up in Government was in coalition

4 with Labour or the Conservatives, who were both committed to put fees up.

5 I know that we fought to get the best policy we could in those circumstances.

6 But I also realise that isn’t the point. There’s no easy way to say this:

7 we made a pledge, we didn’t stick to it – and for that I am sorry.

8 When you’ve made a mistake you should apologise.

9 But more importantly – most important of all –

10 you’ve got to learn from your mistakes.

11 And that’s what we will do.

12 I will never again make a pledge unless as a party we are absolutely clear

13 about how we can keep it.

In lines 1–4, Clegg first admits to a particular fault: he acknowledges that he should not have pledged to resist any raising of student tuition fees because (a) there was actually ‘no money around’ (line 2) to finance that policy, and (b) the possible coalition partners opposed that policy, so it was unlikely that the fees could be capped. This acknowledgement is ambivalent. On the one hand, it pertains to Clegg’s pre-election misjudgement, for which he actually gives no reasons – he merely says that he should have behaved otherwise. On the other hand, it can be also interpreted as an excuse for making his current policy choices in the government as he presents two reasons for raising the tuition fees. Second, Clegg frames himself as a Hero who ‘fought to get the best policy’ (line 5), thus in effect implying that the Conservatives, who resisted his policy in the coalition government, should be seen as Villains. Notably, however, Clegg does not refer to any Victims – for instance, the students who were forced to pay higher fees have been omitted from the statement. Hence an element that is often expected of a full apology – an expression of concern for all of those who suffered from the offence – is missing here.

In line 7, Clegg apologises by saying ‘I am sorry’. However, he limits his apology to a specific component of his offence: he apologises for not keeping a promise; he does not apologise for supporting the decision to raise tuition fees. He does not direct his apology to those people who may feel deterred from seeking higher education because going to a university has become much more costly. In terms of social actor representation, Clegg notably switches between using first person singular and plural pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’, which seems to make blame less targeted as it is not really clear exactly to whom ‘we’ may refer.

In line 8, Clegg first recites an imperative (‘When you’ve made a mistake you should apologise’) that mainly seems to serve as an indication of his moral high ground. Second, he asserts that it is ‘most important of all’ to learn from one’s mistakes (lines 9–10) and then claims to perform this learning by promising to refrain from the particular kind of behaviour that he claims to regret – making pledges that cannot be easily kept – in the future. However, he does not offer any compensation for the possible harm that his wrongdoing may have caused to particular people. By emphasising the importance of ‘learning’ (that is relatively easy to do), he backgrounds the importance of compensation (which may be difficult and costly to provide). By focusing his talk on his future actions (using the future tense as in ‘that’s what we will do’ in line 11), he backgrounds his past wrongdoing. By seemingly claiming to have learned a lesson, he is appealing to his audience’s emotions and tries to give an appearance of a person with a good character and high moral standards – which ultimately is an act of positive self-presentation. Thus, this statement cannot be seen as a full apology, but merely an attempt to defuse some blame and attract sympathy.

Changing the subject is realised mainly in two ways: via topic control, which may involve violations of the maxim of relation, for instance, providing distracting information which is irrelevant to the accusations, or by a manipulative strategy of making use of recipients’ vulnerabilities – choosing such a time for communicating when the potential critics are most likely distracted by other actions, thus ‘burying’ information.

The fallacies may include provision of irrelevant arguments (ignoratio elenchi) and talking about unrelated problems raised by (possibly imaginary) opponents (straw man). From a cognitive point of view, changing the subject is based on manipulating Short Term Memory-based discourse understanding: the blame taker uses text and talk and imagery to draw the recipient’s attention to information X rather than possibly blameworthy information Y.

To illustrate the use of this blame avoidance strategy, I analyse an excerpt from a transcript of a press conference given by UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on 7 January 2013 (UK Cabinet Office, 2013). This widely covered press conference was designed and performed by the government as part of launching its ‘mid-term review’ – an important self-assessment document comparing the commitments made in its programme 2.5 years earlier to the policies it had actually carried out to date. The press conference was a major proactive attempt at positive self-presentation of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition. However, the format of a press conference provides the participating journalists with an opportunity to directly confront the Ministers with questions that draw attention to negative and possibly blameworthy phenomena instead. Here, I focus on three conversational turns that took place after both David Cameron and Nick Clegg had finished their short speeches: a journalist asks an inquisitorial question, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg replies and at some point the journalist interrupts to repeat his question.

1 ##Question

2 This is a very nice document. Thank you for giving it to us, but I think a lot of

3 people are going to wonder what the point of it is tonight. I can tell you the one

4 thing they do want to know, which is what’s going to happen to the economy this

5 year. Can you both give us a picture of where you think we are? Is a triple-dip

6 recession possible? Likely? Are you really both confident that the economy is going

7 to grow this year? If not, why not? Are you contemplating other measures if it

8 doesn’t come out the way you want?

9

10 ##Deputy Prime Minister

11 The first thing I’d say is that we’ve been very open with the British people about

12 the fact that the time needed to get the job done, that the time needed for the

13 economy to heal fully, is taking longer than frankly anyone expected.

14 We’ve been very open about that.

15 We’ve actually said that dealing with the structural deficit, balancing the books, is

16 going to take longer.

17 We couldn’t have been more open that it is going to take longer and it does mean that

18 the next parliament, the next government, will need to complete

19 the job that we have initiated, but we’ve made huge strides. The deficit is 25% lower.

20 Now, hang on; it’s important.

21

22 ##Question

23 My question was about are you confident, both of you, that we are on the track to

24 growth.

In his first turn (lines 2–8), the journalist uses mock politeness by delivering an obviously insincere compliment and an expression of gratitude: ‘This is a very nice document. Thank you for giving it to us’. He follows it up with a string of questions about the economic forecast for the country – an issue that, as he implies, the ministers had chosen to neglect in their presentation.

In response, Deputy Prime Minister Clegg starts to talk at length about how ‘open’ the government has been, instead of addressing the questions actually raised by the journalist. Clegg thus instantly tries to avoid blame in this conversational situation by committing an argumentative ‘straw man’ fallacy. It may be argued that the choice of this particular manoeuvre was encouraged by the fact that the journalist asked multiple questions at one go – the less focused is the question, the more space there seems to be for sidestepping a straightforward reply. The repeated (in lines 11, 14 and 17) use of the word ‘open’ (which tends to have a generally positive connotation in discourses about government) seems to indicate that the speaker is anxious to persuade the audience that he is talking honestly. Moreover, he attempts to shift at least some of the responsibility for the economic situation in the country away from the current government by stating that ‘the next parliament, the next government, will need to complete the job that we have initiated’ (lines 18–19), disregarding that the questions asked were about the current year.

Restricting information can be described pragmatically as a violation of the maxim of quantity: the officeholders choose not to provide certain information about issues which may attract blame (e.g. misuse of the public funds or misconduct of public service providers), and therefore, their contribution to public discussion may be seen as not as informative as required. When justifying these restrictions, officials often make use of the topos of law (for instance, ‘This information is classified under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954’), and the legitimations are mainly based on authority.

As an illustration of analysis, I use another excerpt from the transcript of the press conference by David Cameron and Nick Clegg on 7 January 2013. Here, a journalist has asked them whether they are both confident that the UK economy is ‘on the track to growth’. First, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg gives his answer and then the Prime Minister David Cameron has a turn:

1 ## Deputy Prime Minister

2 I don’t think anyone should start making foolish statistical predictions about

3 what’s going to happen to something as unpredictable as the global economy,

4 but we’re doing the right reforms and implementing the right changes

5 to ensure that healing process continues.

6

7 ## Prime Minister

8 I’ll just add – and I agree with every word of that – but I’ll just add to that point that

9 we don’t now make our own forecasts.

10 We’ve given that to the Office for Budget Responsibility.

11 They are forecasting growth this year, as are almost every other economic forecaster.

12 That’s what the forecasters say.

Here, Clegg first implies that economic forecasts should not be talked about by labelling anyone who would do this ‘foolish’ (line 2). He not only avoids giving a substantial reply to the journalist’s question but also, by implication of suggesting that answering the particular question would be ‘foolish’, could be seen as ridiculing both the question and the one who asked it. Clegg follows this up with some straightforward positive self-presentation in line 4 (‘we’re doing the right reforms’) that is not supported by any data.

Cameron then indicates that he and Clegg should not be expected to talk about the economic outlook for the United Kingdom, because the responsibility to make economic forecasts has been given by the government to a specific agency: the Office for Budget Responsibility (line 10). Both ministers apparently regard talking about economic forecasts as something that may attract blame – especially if their predictions later turn out to be wrong. Therefore, they have preemptively established a separate unit that they can conveniently use as a blame ‘lightning rod’: the ministers can choose not to provide possibly ‘inconvenient’ information themselves by claiming that officially this is a task for someone else (topos of law). Notably, Cameron represents the Office for Budget Responsibility as an ‘outgroup’ by using third person plural pronoun ‘they’ (‘they are forecasting growth’), thus further distancing himself from the forecast. Moreover, the name of the unit – Office for Budget Responsibility – is salient, because it implies that the unit takes responsibility for the budget, thereby seemingly removing (at least some of) the responsibility for financial outcomes from the rest of the government.

‘Lying doggo ’ (a British informal term for ‘being in hiding and keeping quiet’) as a blame avoidance strategy basically means opting out of conversation or opting for one-way communication. In this case, officeholders do not regard opponents as serious partners in the discussion and do not defend their standpoints (‘No comment’), thus violating the essential pragma-dialectical rules which should grant the parties with conflicting views the freedom to argue and the obligation to give reasons.

Admittedly, silence can be a difficult phenomenon to study and exemplify in linguistic terms as it seems to involve no text or talk. However, the strategic uses of silence in political communication can be sometimes interpreted by analysing metadiscourses about these silences, that is, what others say that they see as being absent from someone’s discourse (Schröter, 2013). Here is an example of such metadiscourse. On 21 June 2012, the BBC ran a story titled ‘Cameron ducks Gary Barlow tax avoidance question’ (BBC News, 2012). The article points out that when comedian Jimmy Carr and (Conservative Party supporting) musician Gary Barlow were both accused of using tax avoidance schemes, then Prime Minister David Cameron publicly criticised Carr but did not say anything about Barlow. Cameron opted out of discussing this topic simply by saying that he was not going to give a ‘running commentary’ on people’s tax affairs.

Working behind the scenes is most directly related to linguistic and non-linguistic forms of coercion and bribery and is often aimed at silencing the opponents. It may involve administering systematic personal attacks on potential blame makers (argumentum ad baculum, argumentum ad hominem), sometimes threatening them with legal sanctions (topos of law/justice) or with humiliation, that is, offending their positive face. This strategy is manipulative as its goal is to induce less powerful groups into tending to accept the arguments of a more powerful organisation.

It is very difficult to obtain concrete textual examples of such covert interactions. ⁷ However, compelling evidence of behind-the-scenes relationships between government officeholders and the press has emerged, for example, from a 2012 independent inquiry in the United Kingdom, commonly known as the Leveson Report. The report was commissioned by the UK Government to cover the culture, practices and ethics of the press in its relations with the public, the police and politicians. In the executive summary of the report, Lord Justice Leveson, who led the inquiry, concludes that over several decades the political parties and the government ‘have had or developed too close a relationship with the press in a way which has not been in the public interest’ and adds that ‘in part, it has been a matter of going too far in trying to control the supply of news and information to the public in return for the hope of favourable treatment by sections of the press’ (The Leveson Inquiry, 2012: 26). Therefore, an analyst of discursive strategies of blame avoidance in government should give due consideration to a possibility that some important moves in the blame game at hand may be unobservable and extra-linguistic.

Concluding remarks

In this article, I have sketched a new way of dissecting and interpreting communicative aspects of blame-avoiding behaviour in government in terms of specific discursive strategies. I have also demonstrated its usefulness by analysing concrete examples of text and talk by top government officeholders. At times, officeholders use intricate and creative ways of shifting blame, backgrounding blameworthy phenomena in their text and talk or making blame seem less targeted. My framework helps discourse analysts see certain linguistic features in government communication not only as constitutive elements of discursive strategies (ways of arguing, attributing, mitigating, etc.) but possibly also as elements of particular broader socio-political macro-strategies – ways of avoiding blame. I have laid the foundation for more systematic and rigorous discourse-analytic exploration of these macro-strategies.

Admittedly, my framework has at least two limitations. First, it is tentative and not necessarily comprehensive. Further empirical studies of text and talk patterns of executive government institutions or particular officeholders who try to avoid accusations of wrongdoing could point to specific discursive choices which may not fit under any of the proposed categories. Also, as my example analyses have proven, in real-life situations we should expect to observe simultaneous or mixed use (blending) of several discursive strategies of avoiding blame risk. Furthermore, some of the discursive strategies may be applied only together with non-discursive practices of blame avoidance (e.g. establishing the Office for Budget Responsibility and then using it as a ‘lightning rod’ for blame in public text and talk).

The second caveat or challenge is that the heuristic can only be effectively used in conjunction with additional systematic analysis of a concrete topic at hand and the particular context wherein the strategies are enacted. The topic of a blame game includes the subject matter of a blame event or a blame risk: the actors, the magnitude of harm caused or the seriousness of a violation and so forth. The context of a blame game may be operationalised by breaking it down into several layers of analysis (following Wodak, 2011). The context entails intertextual and interdiscursive relationships, for instance, capturing the dynamics of interaction and taking into consideration the many genres in which the described strategies may occur. It might be possible to reveal any typical sequences of discursive moves by different participants of the blame game in particular genres of executive governance, like face-to-face interactions, policy documents, official news releases, personal emails, speeches, blog posts, interviews and so on. ⁸ The context entails extra-linguistic institutional and situational variables, such as the preferred ways of sustaining domination within the blame taking institution, the formality/informality of the situation and – probably most saliently – whether the text and talk about blame are publicly mediated or remain solely in the backstage. It is also evident that some blame avoidance strategies are more overt and can be more easily detected by analysing micro-processes of discourse, while others are more hidden (e.g. behind-the-scenes work). Hence, additional attention should be given to coercion as a central strategic function of exercising administrative power. ⁹ The context of a blame game also entails its broader historical and socio-political backdrop, for instance, the financial crisis and austerity politics in the United Kingdom in my example analysis.

Despite these caveats, I hope to have demonstrated a plausible way of operationalising blame avoidance in discourse-analytic terms. Understanding blame avoidance as a leitmotif of government communication could lead to the application of new useful analytic tools within discourse studies and thus open new avenues of critical research into language use in politics and bureaucratic organisations.