Greed and lust–for power, for sex, or just for money–are the main ingredients in many political scandals. The resulting fall from grace usually leaves politicians, bureaucrats, and other government workers devastated. Scandals also tend to have a lasting impact on voters and democratic processes. A wealth of experimental studies have examined the effect of political scandals on news consumers and their candidate evaluations. In general, they reveal negative scandal-spillover effects with news consumers evaluating politicians more negatively when they are caught up in a scandal (Carlson, Ganiel, & Hyde, 2000; Funk, 1996; McDermott, Schwartz, & Vallejo, 2015; Mitchell, 2014; von Sikorski, Knoll, & Ludwig, 2018).
However, several central research gaps remain. In particular, little is known about how individuals’ preexisting political beliefs and their perception of the specific circumstances of a scandal interact to determine its consequences.
In the current article, we address this gap by combining insights from several different fields of research–political psychology, communication science, and political science–and conducting a meta-analysis of experimental findings. We find that a key factor in determining the negative scandal effects is that individuals who are highly familiar with a politician’s scandalous conduct may be able to draw connections between it and other political actors or institutions, thus affecting their overall assessment of political trust.
We also show that the degree to which individual politicians are perceived as being in control of their own scandalous behavior is a key moderator of the negative scandal-spillover effects. Those who are perceived as being in control of their misbehavior tend to attribute it to their own intentional misconduct, which is not per se transferable to other politicians, thereby preventing negative spillover effects on political trust more generally.
About the Author
