Analysis of government officials' blame avoidance strategies during local councillors' questioning: using Miaoli County in Taiwan as an example

One of the purposes of legislator questioning is to expose the shortcomings of administrative officials and to get officials to admit their deficiencies and responsibilities. However, it is not easy to do this because officials may resort to evasive strategies when answering questions. This article used the classification method of blame avoidance strategies to classify officials’ responses into three types to explore the circumstances under which officials use different strategies. This research analysed the content of officials' answers during the question time of the 18th session (2014–2018) of the Miaoli County Council in Taiwan. The results showed that administrative officials adopted more blame avoidance strategies when facing questions from councillors of the opposition party and when the questions involved serious issues. On the contrary, when questions contained supporting evidence, officials used fewer blame avoidance strategies.