Whether it is bribery, cronyism, or petty corruption, political scandals can destroy public trust in government institutions and politicians. They can lead to investigations and resignations and exacerbate citizens’ cynicism of political processes. They can even affect democracy itself. President Trump has accelerated this trend with his openly transactional approach to power, in which he rewards or punishes friends and foes as he sees fit. His brazenness warps perceptions of what counts as corrupt and threatens to set a dangerous precedent for future misconduct.
Scandal studies are a rich source of research in social and political science, often drawing on disciplinary perspectives from both sociology and communication studies. While many studies focus on the immediate evaluative consequences of scandals, few probe the potential long-term influences on the process of accountability and specific trust judgments. Future research should use prolonged-exposure experiments (exposing subjects to multiple scandal stimuli over time) and panel designs (collecting data on the same respondents over several waves) to more intensively examine these effects.
A comprehensive review of scandal research shows that scandals regularly influence citizens’ evaluations of politicians, and that these evaluative impacts vary by five central moderators: politician characteristics, behavior, context, and prior attitudes. They also differ by the electoral system: scandals generate more negative evaluative effects in party-centered systems than in democratic, candidate-centered regimes.