Political scandal is a constant feature of contemporary politics, and the public often sees politicians accused of corruption or of misbehavior in their private lives. These scandals can reveal a politician’s greed, lust for power, or moral bankruptcy, and they frequently involve the use of a vigilant investigative press. Sometimes, the scandals lead to convictions, impeachment, or resignation. But, just as often, these events don’t seem to change voters’ attitudes or vote choices, and the scandals fade from the headlines.
This is because the transformation of bad behavior into a public scandal is deeply political, and exposing the misbehavior is always a choice weighed against the cost and benefits for politicians’ respective political parties. This key insight is at the heart of this article’s theory and evidence, and it explains why the level of political polarization in a country significantly influences the number and severity of scandals.
Previous research has shown that when individuals with positive preexisting candidate evaluations are exposed to negative scandal information about their favorite candidates, they engage in motivated reasoning processes that protect or even reinforce these evaluations (Fischle, 2000). However, not all individual’s defend their prior views ad infinitum; some may abandon the motivated reasoning process and reevaluate their candidate evaluations after they are repeatedly exposed to scandalous information about their preferred politicians.
These reevaluations could have important electoral consequences; in particular, if the scandalous information indicates that a politician is prone to corrupt practices, such as lying, stealing, or manipulating others, then this information should negatively affect political trust for the party of the implicated politician, ceteris paribus. In this article, we test this hypothesis by using a new model of the scandal-spillover effect, which is designed to disentangle partisan effects from individual-level factors.