Blame shifting and blame obfuscation: The blame avoidance effects of delegation in the European Union

The delegation of governance tasks to third parties is generally assumed help governments avoid blame once policies become contested. International organizations, including the European Union (EU), are considered particularly opportune in this regard. literature lacks assessments avoidance effects delegation, let alone different designs. To address gap literature, we study public attributions media coverage two contested EU during financial crisis and migration crisis. We show that effect depends on design: When agents independent (dependent) government control, observe lower (higher) shares targeting (blame shifting effect), when external (internal) apparatus, overall for a policy will be less (more) frequent obfuscation effect). Our findings yield important normative implications how maintain governments’ accountability they have delegated parties.