A political scandal is a damaging event that can have broad ramifications and trigger behavioural responses among voters. The Watergate scandal in the United States, and its implication for President Nixon and his party, is one of the most well-known examples. More recently, the public response to the e-mail scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton has had similarly broad electoral ramifications in the US. The naming convention of using the suffix “-gate” to indicate political scandals indicates the extent to which such events are seen as having high public impact and consequence.
The aim of this article is to study how individuals with strong partisan attachments may be affected by negative scandal information about their favoured candidate. To do so, I model a two-party electoral framework with a candidate, Sen. Smith, who represents one of the parties and is publicly alleged to have committed an integrity violation. Integrity violations are defined as a breach of the behavioral norms that politicians publicly pretend to uphold, such as being unprejudiced or not engaging in discriminatory behavior.
Scandal knowledge causes individuals to reevaluate their evaluations of their supported candidate, but also of all politicians in general. This weakens the expected positive relationship between candidate evaluation and political trust.
To improve comparability of the misconduct incidents, I disaggregate them into incompetence and corruption, whereby corruption refers to a misuse of official positions to gain private benefit, such as to favor family (nepotism), friends, or a party (cronyism). Observations that are not criminally investigated are grouped together under incompetence.