Amid the tumult surrounding President Trump and rising corruption in public institutions, the need for structural reforms to increase the effectiveness of the federal government is more urgent than ever. Harmful Supreme Court decisions and erosion of norms are eroding democratic governance and, at the local level, politicians are increasingly brazen in their behavior. As a result, political scandal has become commonplace.
This is a major problem, because when misbehavior is turned into a political scandal it undermines voters’ ability to determine the truth and dilutes the meaning of the term itself. The reason, as new research reveals, is that the decision to expose a politician’s misconduct to the public is almost always a political choice based on the costs and benefits for a party’s candidates and constituents.
Political scandals can be triggered by many different events, including corruption, ethics violations, and personal affairs like extramarital affairs or physical abuse. The outcome depends on how the event is perceived by the media and, ultimately, by the public. Research across disciplines, including communication (e.g., Kiousis, 2003), political science, sociology, and psychology, shows that when it comes to scandal, there is no such thing as a “bad” scandal. Scandal judgments are shaped by political polarization, and the way they are depicted in the media is a key determinant of their impact.
However, it is often difficult to identify the independent variables influencing political scandal, which has led to inconsistent findings among researchers in these and other disciplines. The current paper offers a new framework to address this issue, and it provides insights into how the content-related independent variable of media sensationalism influences scandal perceptions. The authors conclude that in order to better understand how scandals work, it is important for future research to use panel designs that include multiple waves of data, so that political evaluations made during an emerging scandal can be compared with evaluations made in retrospect.