When politicians engage in scandalous behavior, they violate the trust of their constituents and jeopardize the integrity of democracy. In the United States, President Donald Trump and his allies have violated long-standing norms and abused government power for their own self-interest. While this is not the first scandal in American politics, it is unique in its scope and magnitude. It has stoked widespread discontent and is a wake-up call for voters to demand that their representatives address corruption and restore faith in politics.
Although the research on political scandal has advanced significantly in recent years, important questions remain unexplored. For example, researchers need to better understand how the length and intensity of a scandal influences its effects. Additionally, it is critical to investigate the impact of different types of scandals on voters’ political evaluations. Moreover, panel studies that expose respondents to multiple scandal stimuli over time are necessary to test the long-term effects of political scandals (e.g., Miller Vonnahme, 2014; Mitchell, 2013).
This article addresses these and other issues in the field of political scandal. It builds on previous work by focusing not only on the actions of the politicians involved in a scandal, but also on their political party. This allows us to examine how political polarization drives and motivates the misbehavior that leads to scandal, and ultimately decreases the value of political discourse in a democracy. We examine this question using a new model of a democratic political system with two parties and one elected official, and we show that the results are highly dependent on the level of political polarization in a country.
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