Whether it’s a presidential impeachment, scandalous sex affairs or a corruption trial, the political world is full of them. Politicians’ misbehavior is often a public spectacle that makes voters angry, comedians laugh and politicians blush. But do these scandals matter? Existing research has shown that scandals can have negative consequences for a politician’s career, with the most severe impacts occurring when the misbehavior involves a breach of trust. However, the results from existing studies can be misleading, as they only consider how scandals affect a politician’s chances of being punished at the polls, not at other junctures in their career when they may still have an opportunity to recover from a negative reputational event.
In this article, we build on previous work by arguing that the nature of political scandals has important implications for their impact. Our definition of a scandal includes not only actual violations of norms, such as bribery or graft, but also alleged violations of norms, including extramarital affairs, provocative utterances and hypocrisy. We distinguish between real and alleged violations and study the effect of these distinctions on scandals’ outcomes.
We develop and test a model that accounts for the dynamic relationship between political scandals, corruption and their effects on voter turnout. Our treatment variables include municipal FE dummies as well as election dummies and control for different types of corruption and scandal, such as nepotism, cronyism and patronage. We show that the degree to which a scandal reaches voters depends on the political calculus of the perpetrator and the nature of the underlying misbehavior, as well as how the misconduct is framed by the media. We find that the more polarized a society is, the more incentives arise for aligned parties to shelter their politicians from scandal and the opposing party to make false accusations in order to undermine their opponent’s credibility.
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