The headlines of the day, whether about corruption, bribery or sexual misconduct, highlight a new political reality. The behavior of our elected officials seems to be out of control, and the public is largely confused about why. It’s no wonder that voters are increasingly dissatisfied with our democracy.
Although greed and lust (for power, money or sex) are the essential elements of most political scandals, many other contributing factors include mendacity, obfuscation, obsession, moral bankruptcy, naivete or misplaced loyalty or trust. Often, the scandal is revealed by a vigilant investigative press. Frequently, the perpetrators are caught and punished, but sometimes they are not.
During the polarized era of our country, scandal has lost its capacity to hold politicians accountable. Even blatantly unethical behaviors that would have been career-ending scandals a generation ago now result in little more than a minor annoyance. This shift has taken place because the soft guardrails that Levitsky and Ziblatt call norms have eroded.
Political scandals are produced by political forces that shape what is disclosed and how it is framed, including partisan distortions of evidence and false accusations. A key driver of these distortions is polarization, which leads aligned parties to suppress information about their politician and the opposing party to throw out baseless accusations. This creates a vicious circle in which the public is left with incomplete and misleading information, and political evaluations are not anchored on the underlying misconduct. While research has examined the short-term effects of scandals, long-term impacts on processes of accountability and specific trust judgments have yet to be examined. Future research should use prolonged-exposure experiments and panel studies to examine these impacts.