Blame and responsibility attribution across actor dimensions: public media discourse on antimicrobial resistances

IF 4.5 3区管理学 Q1 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Policy Sciences Pub Date : 2026-05-05 DOI:10.1007/s11077-026-09616-w

Tanja Puran, Josefine Wyser, Johanna Hornung, Manuel Fischer

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Actors involved in the governance of a given issue often attribute blame and responsibility to other actors. While such dynamics are usually studied for highly politicized and conflictive issues involving acute crises, pressure for actors to act, and related reputational implications, we study blame and responsibility attribution for a situation of little public attention, a so-called creeping crisis. In this context, we ask how patterns of blame and responsibility attribution develop across actors from different governance levels, actor types, and organizational roles. We do so by descriptively mapping the public media discourse on antimicrobial resistances (AMR) in Switzerland and Germany, based on 633 statements coded in media articles. Results reveal generally more responsibility than blame attribution to others. Whether blame and responsibility are rather attributed to similar rather than dissimilar others depends on actors’ governance level, actor type or organizational role. Overall, understanding the dynamics of blame and responsibility attribution is important, as they influence policy design, and might increase the risk of political deadlock.

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跨行为者维度的责备和责任归因：关于抗菌素耐药性的公共媒体话语

参与特定问题治理的参与者经常将责任和指责归咎于其他参与者。虽然这种动态通常研究的是高度政治化和冲突性的问题，包括急性危机、行为者采取行动的压力以及相关的声誉影响，但我们研究的是公众很少关注的情况下的指责和责任归因，即所谓的悄悄发生的危机。在这种情况下，我们询问来自不同治理级别、参与者类型和组织角色的参与者之间的责备和责任归因模式是如何发展的。我们根据媒体文章中编码的633条声明，对瑞士和德国关于抗菌素耐药性（AMR）的公共媒体话语进行了描述性绘制。结果显示，责任通常比归咎于他人更多。指责和责任是否归咎于相似的人，而不是不同的人，取决于行动者的治理水平、行动者类型或组织角色。总的来说，理解指责和责任归属的动态是重要的，因为它们影响政策设计，并可能增加政治僵局的风险。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Policy Sciences Multiple-

CiteScore

9.70

自引率

9.40%

发文量

期刊介绍： The policy sciences are distinctive within the policy movement in that they embrace the scholarly traditions innovated and elaborated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. Within these pages we provide space for approaches that are problem-oriented, contextual, and multi-method in orientation. There are many other journals in which authors can take top-down, deductive, and large-sample approach or adopt a primarily theoretical focus. Policy Sciences encourages systematic and empirical investigations in which problems are clearly identified from a practical and theoretical perspective, are well situated in the extant literature, and are investigated utilizing methodologies compatible with contextual, as opposed to reductionist, understandings. We tend not to publish pieces that are solely theoretical, but favor works in which the applied policy lessons are clearly articulated. Policy Sciences favors, but does not publish exclusively, works that either explicitly or implicitly utilize the policy sciences framework. The policy sciences can be applied to articles with greater or lesser intensity to accommodate the focus of an author’s work. At the minimum, this means taking a problem oriented, multi-method or contextual approach. At the fullest expression, it may mean leveraging central theory or explicitly applying aspects of the framework, which is comprised of three principal dimensions: (1) social process, which is mapped in terms of participants, perspectives, situations, base values, strategies, outcomes and effects, with values (power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, rectitude, respect, well-being, and affection) being the key elements in understanding participants’ behaviors and interactions; (2) decision process, which is mapped in terms of seven functions—intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal; and (3) problem orientation, which comprises the intellectual tasks of clarifying goals, describing trends, analyzing conditions, projecting developments, and inventing, evaluating, and selecting alternatives. There is a more extensive core literature that also applies and can be visited at the policy sciences website: http://www.policysciences.org/classicworks.cfm. In addition to articles that explicitly utilize the policy sciences framework, Policy Sciences has a long tradition of publishing papers that draw on various aspects of that framework and its central theory as well as high quality conceptual pieces that address key challenges, opportunities, or approaches in ways congruent with the perspective that this journal strives to maintain and extend.Officially cited as: Policy Sci