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Cited by 2,145

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Politics of Blame Avoidance

Weaver, R. Kent·1986·Journal of Public Policy

Abstract

Politicians are motivated primarily by the desire to avoid blame for unpopular actions rather than by seeking to claim credit for popular ones. This results from voters' ‘negativity bias’: their tendency to be more sensitive to real or potential losses than they are to gains. Incentives to avoid blame lead politicians to adopt a distinctive set of political strategies, including agenda limitation, scapegoating, ‘passing the buck’ and defection (‘jumping on the bandwagon’) that are different than those they would follow if they were primarily interested in pursuing good policy or maximizing credit-claiming opportunities. These strategies in turn lead to important policy effects, including a surrender of discretion even when it offers important credit-claiming opportunities.

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Metadata

Authors
Weaver, R. K.
Venue
Journal of Public Policy
Published
1986-10
Volume
6
Issue
4
Pages
371-398
ISSN
  • 0143-814X (ISSN-L)
  • 1469-7815
OpenAlex
W1964361362
Cited by
2,145
References
2
FWCI
23.97
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Politics of Blame Avoidance. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1017/s0143814x00004219
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Weaver, R. K. (1986). The Politics of Blame Avoidance. Journal of Public Policy. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0143814x00004219

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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.