The Nobel prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom once wrote about “the danger of self-evident truths” within academic research, warning that they were often wrong, or at the very least misleading.
Since its earliest emergence as an academic discipline, political science has been forged around the self-evident truth that “blame is bad” and that any rational politician would always prioritise avoiding blame above seeking credit.
As a result, a sweeping seam of scholarship can be traced from Machiavelli’s oft-cited dictum that “princes should delegate to others the enactment of unpopular measures and keep in their own hands the distribution of favours”. Studies have looked at “the politics of blame” and have analysed “blame games”. Some have looked at how blame feeds into crisis management and others have dissected the complex relationship between blame and credit.
