Political scandal is all too common at the local, state and national levels. Yet, despite their prevalence, there is little consensus on how political scandals occur and how they affect voters. In fact, most works on scandal take one of two approaches: they either examine a specific scandal or they investigate the ways in which the media frames and discusses a politician’s misbehavior.
While these studies have produced valuable insights, they often lack a more holistic understanding of the phenomenon. They focus on how the media constructs a political scandal and how these processes differ across time and context. They fail to fully appreciate how the changing media environment shapes news norms and, therefore, how scandal discussions take place.
This article aims to fill in these gaps by developing a theory of political scandal. Drawing on an analysis of the Whitewater scandal, it demonstrates that a political scandal’s intensity (i.e., how much time the scandal occupies the front page) is a critical independent variable that significantly influences its effects. It also shows that the emergence of digital technology has changed the nature of scandal discussion by allowing average individuals to more collaboratively contribute to the construction of political scandal narratives.
By incorporating political polarization into the model, the authors provide new insights about why politicians engage in scandal-making and what effect it has on voters. In particular, they show that polarization encourages an aligned party to hide evidence of misbehavior and motivates the opposition party to make false accusations, thus diminishing the value of political discourse and making it harder for voters to determine who is truly honest.