Scandals are public events that expose unethical behavior by politicians and shake citizens’ trust in politics. They can lead to resignations, impact policy-making, and even affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (von Sikorski & Knoll, 2017). While political scandals can occur at the federal, state, or local level, voters often assume that all politicians are equally likely to engage in questionable behavior. This assumption is flawed. In fact, the transformation of private misbehavior into a public scandal is deeply political and always involves a choice weighed against the costs and benefits to respective political parties.
How can we understand this process of scandal-making? In this article, Wioletta Dziuda and William Howell of UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy introduce a new theory of political scandal. Their model shows how the intensity of political scandals depends on the degree of political polarization in a country. Political polarization increases the likelihood that a politician’s private actions will become a scandal and decreases voters’ ability to evaluate the true extent of political misbehavior.
Their research is grounded in a Montesquieu-inspired notion of journalism as an important watchdog institution for democracy, holding powerful actors accountable. They argue that a core function of journalism is to reveal and frame norm violations, including trivial ones, as scandals. But they also show that media often ignores serious scandals and inflates the importance of minor norm violations to gain attention, a phenomenon they call instrumentalization. This distortion of the truth undermines readers’ ability to evaluate scandals and informs their own judgments about whether politicians are trustworthy or not.