Whether it’s sex, greed or power-grabbing, political scandal is a part of the human condition. It makes voters fume, comedians laugh and politicians blush. Scandals can destroy careers and derail entire administrations. They can result in impeachment, imprisonment or death. Usually, they are based on notoriety and involve allegations of wrongdoing by people in positions of trust, like politicians or bureaucrats. They may involve a crime, a cover-up, an affair, a misunderstanding or a breach of ethics. Often, the scandal involves a lot of public attention, a vigilant investigative press and public outrage.
A recent study by UChicago’s Wioletta Dziuda and William G. Howell examines the forces that give rise to political scandal and reveals some surprising results. In a model of the American political system, Dziuda and Howell find that, in addition to voters’ innate desire for information, political polarization also creates incentives for politicians to expose misbehavior by members of the opposing party, even when such accusations are flimsy or have little chance of being true.
The authors also find that, when voters receive information about a scandal, their evaluations of candidates become more negative. However, they do not expect this to lead to a decrease in the overall confidence that voters have in their politicians. This is because research informed by the motivated reasoning perspective suggests that partisans are likely to defend their preexisting candidate evaluations against incongruent and negative incoming information (i.e., scandal). In fact, the stronger a voter’s prior evaluation of a candidate, the more she will use new scandal knowledge to bolster that view.
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