Scandal Potential: How Political Context and News Congestion Affect the President's Vulnerability to Media Scandal

Abstract

Despite its importance in contemporary American politics, presidential scandal is poorly understood within political science. Scholars typically interpret scandals as resulting from the disclosure of official misbehavior, but the likelihood and intensity of media scandals is also influenced by the political and news context. This article provides a theoretical argument for two independent factors that should increase the president's vulnerability to scandal: low approval among opposition party identifiers and a lack of congestion in the news agenda. Using new data and statistical approaches, I find strong support for both claims. These results suggest that contextual factors shape the occurrence of political events and how such events are interpreted.

Politicians under investigation: The news Media's effect on the likelihood of resignation

“…Previous research suggests that this is an unproblematic assumption. When other newsworthy events cause a congestion of the news agenda, there is a crowding out of disasters news (Eisensee and Strömberg, 2007), scandal coverage (Nyhan, 2014), and campaign coverage (Garcia-Jimeno and Yildirim, 2015). We present evidence that this relationship also holds for lift coverage.…”

Moralism, Constructivism, Relativism: Identifying and Describin g the Approaches of Research on Scandal

“…The strategic constructivist approach [32,[45][46][47][48], initially introduced in 2009 by Nyhan, mainly comes from the United States. The theoretical assumptions of those approaches, which predominantly deal with political scandals, are both demonstrated with regard to their original political meaning and transferred to an abstract level in order to make the approach useful for further types of scandals.…”

“…Following this logic, the scale of scandal is associated with the abilities of the system agents to label the behavior as negative, dangerous, and deviant. Moreover, the stronger the confrontation between opposition and government, the more the former will promote and impel the scandal [47]. In other words: The stronger the hostility between the different parties of system elites are, the larger the scale of the scandal will be.…”

“…Moreover, the approach draws a realistic picture of the scandal by depicting it as an instrument of power -not only in the hands of the media, but also in the hands of the system elites. The main point of criticism has been already handled by Nyhan [47] in his latest study. Certainly, the interpretation by agents from the same system is essential to the understanding of the scandal, which is why media coverage refers to them.…”

“…Hence, there is a symbiotic relationship between media and members of a system. Correspondingly, Nyhan [47] also now regards the scandal as a "coproduction" of media and opposition politicians. The new view should not be overlooked, however, in line with Nyhan [46] the previous considerations should be assigned to the strategic constructivist approach.…”