Political scandal is a common feature of many political systems, and it has long attracted the attention of scholars. In particular, scholars have studied how and why politicians’ private misbehavior transforms into a public scandal (Brown & Gitlin, 2011), how journalists cover these events, and how the media might influence voters’ perceptions of such scandals (Chapman, 2000; Fogarty, 2013).
However, most previous research on political scandals has been limited to lab experiments with fictitious cases and candidates. These studies usually show that news consumers tend to evaluate a scandalized politician unfavorably and negatively. Moreover, they may also transfer their negative perceptions of the scandalized politician onto other political actors. This is called scandal-spillover and can be explained by motivated reasoning as well as by scandal knowledge.
The present study uses a novel approach to investigate these issues in the context of two real political scandals. This research shows that political polarization is an important force that generates and spreads these negative perceptions. It does so by encouraging parties to engage in dishonest behavior and making voters’ evaluations of politicians more biased towards the ideologically aligned party.
In addition, the authors demonstrate that, despite their negative reputation, these scandalized politicians remain in office longer than those without any such reputations. This is consistent with the assumption that a scandal does not necessarily imply that a politician engaged in corrupt or unethical conduct but rather that the public perceives this politician as having poor character traits.
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