Opportunistic Blame: How Domestic Opposition Erodes Democratic Accountability in Foreign Policy

• In Event: Resolve, Threats, Blame, and Audience Costs

Abstract

If foreign affairs are of low interest to the voters and, thus, not likely to affect the chance of winning election, why do opposition elites arduously add unjustifiable attacks against the incumbent to the blame for a foreign policy failure and how do such attacks work? Based on the assumption that voters do sometimes attend to foreign policy issues, I argue that the opposition elites engage in opportunistic blaming when the country faces a foreign policy failure, because they want to easily win an election by utilizing the failure as an opportunity to make voters form a negative impression of the incumbent as the enemy within. To maximize the probability of winning an upcoming election, the opposition elites strategically make opportunistic blame more fact-based when the policy stakes are higher and rely more on providing negative information than on triggering preexisting negative impressions when the public support for their party is lower. Evidence from a factorial survey experiment with South Korean voter sample and a list experiment with South Korean legislators is provided and its implications for democratic accountability, foreign policy, and crisis management are discussed.

Author

• Joon Hyuk Chung, University of California, San Diego