Inter-state blaming during crises: the role of non-institutional factors
研究了危机中政府间相互指责的非制度性影响因素，基于18个OECD国家在新冠疫情初期的新闻发布会数据，发现危机严重程度、地理和价值接近性会影响指责可能性。
Blaming is a crucial mechanism through which governments mitigate public dissatisfaction and secure political survival, particularly when they must justify unpopular decisions under crisis conditions. While research on blaming has expanded considerably, we still know little about inter-state, government-to-government blaming in crises. This gap persists despite governments increasingly externalising responsibility to shape international narratives, manage domestic accountability, and influence public perception in a globalised crisis context. The article addresses the question of how non-institutional factors influence inter-state blaming between governments. It focuses on crisis severity, country proximity, and country salience, and uses data from governmental press conferences in 18 OECD countries during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a dyadic design, it identifies instances of blaming, and, by combining keyword-in-context analysis with a classification approach that draws on human coding and a fine-tuned GPT model, measures the likelihood of blaming. The results of the analysis indicate that non-institutional factors such as crisis severity as well as geographic and value proximity shape the likelihood of inter-state blaming among governments. These results highlight the strategic and relational nature of blame attribution across states and have thus far-reaching implications for the study of blame in international contexts.