As history has demonstrated, political scandal is a common phenomenon. Whether it’s corruption, sex, or even the death of President Harding, politicians do bad things that break social norms and ultimately damage their reputation. The way that these scandals play out, however, is a function of how the breaking of the rules is managed. In the model of polarization, there are strong incentives for the aligned party to hide its politician’s misconduct or to make false accusations in an effort to undermine their opponent’s legitimacy. In either case, the aligned party is able to obscure the evidence that its politician has broken the rules and thus avoids negative consequences.
In previous research, a central finding has been that the involvement of a single politician in a scandal negatively affects citizens’ evaluations of that politician (e.g., Lee, 2018). However, it has been difficult to account for the fact that these negative effects may not only apply to the involved politician but also extend to other politicians whose parties the scandalous politician belongs to.
In order to explore this, we develop a novel experimental design that provides new insights into how news consumers process political scandals. We test the effect of a scandal on a specific individual politician and his or her party and show that a scandal’s impact on individual voter evaluations depends on how the person perceives the transgression of the rules as being their fault or not. In particular, when individuals attribution their own guilt for the political behavior to the scandalous politician, they are likely to use this knowledge to update their evaluations of other politicians as well.