Political scandal is the real or conjectured norm violations of political actors that are reported and framed by news media and other social actors. It has been shown that political scandals have a direct effect on citizens’ evaluations of politicians (e.g., Argyle, 2015), may cause political resignations or other formal reactions, and can also affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (von Sikorski, Knoll, & Matthesson, 2017) or trust in politics (Bowler & Karp, 2004). Yet, the effects of political scandals remain inconsistent: Some studies report boosts in voter turnout or damage to incumbent politicians while others report less significant or no effects at all. These variations can be explained by different moderators such as the particular scandalized actor, political party, type of scandal, citizens’ prior attitudes toward the politician and the media’s depiction of the scandal.
In the present article, we analyze how these moderators vary in a large sample of 35 studies that use either experimental or panel designs. Moreover, we investigate the potential long-term influences of political scandals. For this purpose, we employ prolonged-exposure experiments and explore the influencing mechanisms of political scandals on processes of accountability and specific trust judgments.
While most of the studies analyzed the effects of single-politician scandals, we analyzed also multipolitician scandals and investigated whether or not there were spillover effects between political parties (e.g., Riera et al., 2015). Finally, we analyzed whether or not the scandalized political actor was involved in the media’s depiction of the event as well.