Does Partisanship Stop at Scandal’s Edge? Partisan Resiliency and the Survival of Political Scandal

Abstract

<jats:p>The outbreak of political scandal depresses the approval ratings of the individuals involved, especially the president. Yet, less is known about the partisan effects of approval ratings during scandal, especially the “stickiness” of partisan ties to leaders involved in scandal. Using a survey experiment, we expose respondents to manufactured news coverage of both illegal and not illegal (mismanaged policy) activities involving President Obama. The results demonstrate that the President’s co-partisans are more likely to approve of the President and less likely to desire to impeach the president, even after being informed about illegal activity. In contrast, out partisans are more likely to demand the President’s impeachment for both illegal and not illegal activity. This article provides evidence of how partisanship persists (and even expands) during presidential scandals and how partisan linkages are important to surviving scandal.</jats:p>

Scandal, Hypocrisy, and Resignation: How Partisanship Shapes Evaluations of Politicians’ Transgressions

“…Future work could overcome these limitations by employing an article format (cf. Carlson, Ganiel, and Hyde 2000;Cortina and Rottinghaus 2017;Maier 2011;von Sikorski and Herbst 2020). Moreover, these two studies recruited via Amazon MTurk, whose pool is more diverse than other convenience samples, but tends to be younger, more male, less religious, more educated, and more liberal than the US population (Boas, Christenson, and Glick 2020;Levay, Freese, and Druckman 2016).…”

“…This study builds on previous experimental work manipulating frames from real political scandals (Cortina and Rottinghaus 2017;Maier 2011), but I employ a vignette approach similar to scholars who have investigated the effects of political scandals committed by hypothetical politicians (Bhatti, Hansen, and Olsen 2013;Botero et al 2015Botero et al , 2019aBotero et al , 2019bMiller 2011, 2014;McDermott, Schwartz, and Vallejo 2015;Weitz-Shapiro 2013, 2015;Żemojtel-Piotrowska et al 2017). The vignette format exposes experimental participants to the most pertinent information, akin to headlines or sub-headlines, at different stages of scandalthe initial scandal, second-order transgressions, and resolution.…”

Can individual MPs damage their party's brand? Quasi-experimental evidence from a public procurement corruption scandal

“…2 This lack of evidence can, on the one hand, be explained by the econometric challenges associated with assessing party brand effects that affect all voters simultaneously while coinciding with time-varying factors such as campaign behavior or polling trends. On the other hand, in the assessment of individual scandals, psychological attachments such as partisan biases in scandal perceptions and reactions have been shown to mute accountability (e.g., Cortina and Rottinghaus, 2017). This may have contributed to there being hardly any theorizing on whether party accountability arises from individual political scandals.…”

Do Scandals Matter?

“…For both scholarship on hypothetical and real life cases, partisans believe scandals involving in-party politicians are less serious or problematic than those committed by out-party politicians (Anduiza, Gallego, and Munoz 2013; Walter and Redlawsk 2019; Costa, et al 2020). Even in the face of clear and undisputed charges, co-partisans backed a hypothetical scandal-plagued president despite evidence of illegal and “impeachable” activities (Cortina and Rottinghaus 2017). Partisans weigh scandalous information about out-party politicians more heavily than the same information about co-partisans (Goren 2002).…”