The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Avoiding Blame: An Experimental Investigation of Political Excuses and Justifications
Abstract
Success and even survival in politics frequently depends on the ability of politicians and public officials to extricate themselves from various types of predicaments. Indeed, politicians are particularly adept at extricating themselves, with a wide range of explanations at their disposal to avoid blame for unpopular actions and decisions. However, there has been little systematic research on the effectiveness of various political blame-avoidance strategies. This Note has two purposes. First, a typology of blame-avoidance strategies, or accounts, is developed. Second, the results of an experiment examine the effectiveness of these various accounts in enhancing evaluations of a hypothetical public official are reported.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1984) · American Psychologist · doi:10.1037/0003-066x.39.4.341 · Cited by 6,544
Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands
Thompson, D. F. (1980) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.2307/1954312 · Cited by 651
Cited by
The Impact of Managed Care on Patients' Trust in Medical Care and Their Physicians
Mechanic, D. (1996) · JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association · doi:10.1001/jama.1996.03530450083048 · Cited by 558
Attributing Blame: The Public's Response to Hurricane Katrina
Malhotra, N., & Kuo, A. G. (2008) · The Journal of Politics · doi:10.1017/s0022381607080097 · Cited by 440
Fooks, G., Gilmore, A., Collin, J., Holden, C., & Lee, K. (2013) · Journal of Business Ethics · doi:10.1007/s10551-012-1250-5 · Cited by 295
McGraw, K. M., Best, S., & Timpone, R. (1995) · American Journal of Political Science · doi:10.2307/2111757 · Cited by 91
Self-citationSchlipphak, B., Meiners, P., Treib, O., & Schäfer, C. (2023) · Journal of European Public Policy · doi:10.1080/13501763.2022.2102671 · Cited by 46
Metadata
- Authors
- McGraw, K. M.
- Venue
- British Journal of Political Science
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1990-01
- Volume
- 20
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 119-131
- ISSN
- 0007-1234 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-2112
- OpenAlex
- W1980890871
- Cited by
- 212
- References
- 2
- FWCI
- 15.87
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Avoiding Blame: An Experimental Investigation of Political Excuses and Justifications. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1017/s0007123400005731
- The paper
- McGraw, K. M. (1990). Avoiding Blame: An Experimental Investigation of Political Excuses and Justifications. British Journal of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007123400005731
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.