Political scandal refers to public outrage or a loss of trust in politicians or institutions due to unethical behavior or corruption. The ubiquity of changing media enables the rapid spread of such allegations and triggers intense social responses. While previous research has documented that a scandal typically leads to negative evaluations of the politicians involved, these studies have not systematically accounted for specific prior candidate evaluations and other variables such as scandal knowledge (Bless, Igou, Schwarz, & Wanke, 2000; Puente-Diaz, 2015; von Sikorski & Herbst, 2019).
One such important variable is whether or not voters perceive a politician’s misbehavior as an isolated event or an indicator of her overall personality. During the Gilded Age of US history, for example, industrial robber barons often took bribes from politicians in order to gain access to public funds and monopolize lucrative markets. As a result, public education, healthcare, and infrastructure suffered and workers were forced to work long hours in unsafe conditions with few legal protections.
However, voters may be more likely to conclude that a scandal is isolated if they learn that a politician’s own party strongly denies her opponents’ accusations of inappropriate behavior. In such cases, voters will assume that the opposition’s accusations are based on personal animus and that their own party’s members would not engage in this sort of behavior. This partisan dynamic can obscure the true nature of a scandal and further cloud voters’ ability to evaluate politicians, particularly in polarized times.