This chapter examines how institutional factors and issue characteristics interact to produce consequences for the policies at the root of blame games and for the politicians involved. It reveals that blame games can be important sources of policy change. However, whether politicians are likely to address or even solve policy problems during blame games depends on the configuration of institutional factors in a political system. Some political systems allow for the establishment of a problem-solving attitude among the actors involved, other political systems exhibit blame games that produce a very punitive atmosphere where it is likely that the politicians involved will face consequences. Still, other political systems feature blame games that usually lead to nothing.

This chapter examines and compares the effects of issue characteristics on the nine blame games examined in Chapters 3-5 and consults three additional test cases in the USA in order to corroborate and refine the findings. The chapter demonstrates how issue characteristics – namely the salience of a policy controversy and its proximity to average publics – influence the content of blame game interactions. Issue characteristics influence how political opponents signal the severity of a policy controversy to the public, how they can try to put incumbents under pressure, and how incumbents seek to manage blame for the controversy. This chapter clarifies what is meant by blame games being played out in front of an ‘audience’, and it shows how politicians work with issue characteristics to pull the audience onto their side.

This chapter analyzes and compares the effects of institutional factors on blame game interactions. This chapter reveals how institutional factors – ranging from hard-wired formal institutions to conventions and policy characteristics – provide political incumbents with blame shields and political opponents with blame gateways, thereby channeling their behavior in certain directions. Institutions determine the routinized ways in which democratic political systems manage, or ‘digest’, their policy conflicts.