When are governmental blaming strategies effective? How blame, source and trust effects shape citizens’ acceptance of EU sanctions against democratic backsliding

Abstract

Under what conditions do citizens consider external sanctions against their country to be appropriate? Based on the literature on blame shifting, we argue that citizens should become less likely to support external sanctions if their government defends itself, especially if it seeks to shift the blame to the external actors (blame effect). However, this effect may be moderated by which actor identifies and claims the norm violation (source effect) and by whether citizens trust their government (trust effect). We test our expectations by conducting a survey experiment on EU sanctions against democratic backsliding in six countries (n = 12,000). Our results corroborate the blame and source effects, but disconfirm the trust effect. These findings have important implications for the literatures on blame shifting and external sanctions as well as for how the EU and other International Organizations should design their sanctioning mechanisms.