The lust for power, money and sex that often goes hand-in-hand with politics leads many elected officials to take unethical paths. Whether it is an affair, bribery or corruption, scandals have the potential to tarnish the reputation of politicians and the institutions they represent. Scandals are a common part of political life, but some are more serious than others. Some lead to resignations or impeachment, while others cause voters to lose trust in politicians altogether. The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy has experts who study how these scandals influence the political world.
When political scandals occur, voters’ judgment of a politician is influenced by both the severity of the scandal and their evaluation of the person before the scandal emerged. They may think they are judging the person on their own but, in fact, their judgment of the person reflects what they have heard about the scandal in the media. Moreover, as the mass media depicts scandal events in different ways, voters’ perceptions of a particular scandal may be different across countries (Kepplinger & Lemke, 2016).
We analyze how the central moderators of scandal effects—candidate characteristics, behavior, prior attitudes, context and scandal type—influence the impact on voting. We also examine the interaction between negative scandal-spillover effects on voter evaluations and positive preexisting candidate evaluations. Our analyses suggest that when a person is involved in a scandal, the more positive one’s evaluation of that candidate before the scandal occurred, the less negatively her subsequent evaluation of the politician will be impacted.