Breaking blame: uncovering third-party strategies for contesting political blame in the Brexit referendum campaign.

Blame is inextricable from politics, as exemplified by the Brexit referendum campaign. While existing literature locates the strategies officeholders use to avoid or shift blame, there is a lack of research into what third parties do to contest political blame when they encounter it. To this end, this paper applies qualitative content analysis, complemented by quantitative data, to pre-referendum materials from Leave.EU and the Stronger In campaigns (N = 355), Brexit-related articles in The Metro (N = 60), and a survey-experiment conducted amongst the UK voting public (N = 1368). Three types of contestation strategy are identified: direct (counter-blaming, rebuttal, justification, and naming and shaming blame); displacement (credit and threats); and changing subjects and objects. This paper opens a research agenda into what people other than politicians themselves can do to contest blame, renders visible third-party audiences such as the public in political blame games, and incidentally highlights the failure of Remain to engage with blame during the referendum campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]