The politics of experimental policymaking: the influence of blame avoidance and credit claiming

Policy experimentation has been proposed as a key strategy for coping with increasingly complex policy challenges. Despite considerable academic discussion on public policy experiments, there is a lack of systematic analyses of the political dimensions of policy experimentation. In this paper, we advance the understanding of politics of experimentation by analysing how policy actors’ perceptions of blame avoidance and credit claiming influence experimental policymaking. As a theoretical contribution, we outline expectations about how the mechanisms of blame avoidance and credit claiming can influence policymakers’ attitudes towards experiments and which contextual factors are likely to shape these dynamics. In the empirical part, we probe the plausibility of the theoretical propositions by using a comparative case study of Estonia and Finland. We draw upon policy documents and semi-structured interviews conducted with 66 public officials in Estonia and Finland in 2022–2023. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that the mechanisms of blame avoidance and credit claiming play a significant role in politicians’ decisions to launch large-scale policy experiments. Our study also shows that these impacts are mediated by contextual factors like the urgency of policy problems, expected media reactions, public trust, and cumulative experience with policy experimentation.