When crisis meets election: Navigating blame and credit in a consensus democracy

How do elections affect credit-claiming and blame-shifting patterns in times of crisis? To answer this so far unanswered yet relevant question for crisis management, this study analyses government crisis communication in Germany’s consensus democracy, where federal elections took place in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirically, this study examines media conferences from January 2021 to December 2021, which reveal that the Minister of Health not only shifted responsibility and blame but also claimed credit – particularly before the election. He also opted for implicit rather than explicit forms of blame shifting within the political system and shifted responsibility to citizens. The strategies of citizen blaming and credit claiming were most frequent during the ‘federal emergency brake’ when responsibility was more centralised than in other moments of the pandemic. This research advances blame avoidance theory by combining situational factors (crisis and electoral pressure) and institutional moderators (form of government and governance structures) to explain credit-claiming and blame-shifting patterns. Overall, the findings of this study indicate that institutional factors can moderate blame games in particularly challenging situations when it is essential for political systems to address societal and underlying political problems instead of getting caught up in blame games.