Leadership Style, Crisis Response and Blame Management: The Case of Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

Crisis management research has largely ignored one of the most pressing challenges political leaders are confronted with in the wake of a large-scale extreme event: how to cope with what is commonly called the blame game. In this article, we provide a heuristic to help understand political leader responses to blame in the aftermath of crises, emphasizing the crucial role of their leadership style on the political management of Inquiries. After integrating theoretical and empirical findings on crisis management and political leadership styles, we illustrate our heuristic by applying it to the Bush administration's response to Hurrican Katrina in 2005. We conclude by offering suggestions for further research on the underdeveloped subject of the blame management challenges faced by political leaders in the wake of acute crisis episodes. POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN THE AFTERMATH OF CRISIS The management of urgent threats to core societal values, critical infrastructures and the safety of citizens is an elementary function of government. It requires political and administrative leadership (Boin et al. 2005). Effective crisis leadership entails recognizing emerging threats, initiating efforts to mitigate them and deal with their consequences, and, once an acute crisis period has passed, re-establishing a sense of normalcy. These are no easy tasks in a time of new threats and increasingly vulnerable societies. Much attention in both research and practice has traditionally focused on the acute response phase: the critical decisions that must be made during a crisis and the perennial difficulties in communicating these decisions to a frightened public (see, for example, Flin 1996; Rosenthal et al. 1989; Ulmer et al. 2007). In recent disasters, however, it was the 'crisis after the crisis' that held societies spellbound. In Western societies, the post-crisis phase is increasingly marked by intense politicization ('t Hart 1993; Olson 1998; Rosenthal 1998; Boin et al. 2008). While the crisis is still unfolding, the drama of accountability and blaming begins. Surprisingly, however, little has been written about the wider political leadership challenges generated by the 'crisis after the crisis'. These challenges focus on the management of accountability and the avoidance of blame that tends to be apportioned in the wake of extraordinary, disturbing and destabilizing events. When crises occur, something or somebody must be blamed-for causing the crisis, failing to prevent it, or inadequately responding to it (Bovens and 't Hart 1996; Hood 2002). Governments and their leaders are often key targets for these blaming impulses. Some analysts have explored the causes and drivers of blame games and blame management (Weaver 1986; Ellis 1994; Hood 2002; Hearit 2006; Hood et al. 2009). Others have detailed how crisis-induced political blame games generally unfold (McGraw 1990, 1991; Brändström and Kuipers 2003). Our particular interest is whether the leadership styles of political leaders can help explain the dynamics and outcome of these ...

Anticipatory and reactive forms of blame avoidance: of foxes and lions

“…Table 1 provides an overview of the literature on BAB along the two dimensions outlined above. (Pierson, 1994(Pierson, , 1996 BAB as a means of pursuing risky reforms (Vis, 2016) Arms-length institutional bodies that displace blame (Fiorina, 1982;Horn, 1995) Indexing provisions that limit budgetary discretion (Weaver, 1988) Opposition of policies that impose large and direct costs (Arnold, 1990) Blame-decreasing organizational responses to demands for transparency (Hood and Rothstein, 2001) Responsibility-blurring governance vacuums in multi-level systems (Bache et al, 2015) Reactive BAB Justification for retrenchment and its effects (Mortensen, 2012;Wenzelburger and Hörisch, 2016) Blame-deflecting effects of political accounts (McGraw, 1991) Cabinet officials as 'lightning rods' (Ellis, 1994) Blame management after crisis situations (Bovens et al, 1999;Brändström and Kuipers, 2003;Brändström et al, 2008;Hood et al, 2009;Boin et al, 2010;Moynihan, 2012;Brändström, 2015) Commissions of inquiry for blame avoidance reasons (Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2010) Blame attribution effects of public sector reforms (Mortensen, 2013b) Conceptualizing BAB…”

Leadership in Precarious Contexts: Studying Political Leaders after the Global Financial Crisis

“…However, the post-crisis phase, or the "crisis after the crisis", increasingly is marked by intense politicization. In a single-case study of the Hurricane Katrina crisis, Boin et al (2010) took a new tack and focused on evaluating to what degree a politician's personal leadership style explains the outcomes of crisis-induced blame games. They concluded President George W. Bush's leadership style was ill fitted to the sort of crisis he tried to manage.…”

Dissonance and decision-making mistakes in the age of risk

“…Dissonance reduction offers another perspective on "blame avoidance behaviour" by policymakers (Hinterleitner & Sager 2015;Hood 2010;Waever 1986). While the "blame game" results from a wide variety of organisational, political, and even individual difference factors (Boin et al, 2010), dissonance and its reduction can help to account for some of the underlying psychological dynamics that lead individuals to deny personal responsibility for failures and mistakes. Although such denials and rationalisations can be politically-motivated, there is some recent evidence that the desire to reduce dissonance can actually result in false memories (Rodriguez & Strange 2015), giving another plausible psychological explanation for why policymakers might claim to have supported (or opposed) policies that they in fact did not.…”