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Scandal, Hypocrisy, and Resignation: How Partisanship Shapes Evaluations of Politicians’ Transgressions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2020

Adam D. Wolsky Open the ORCID record for Adam D. Wolsky [Opens in a new window]
Adam D. Wolsky*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN37203, USA
*
Email: adam.d.wolsky@vanderbilt.edu, Twitter: @adamdwolsky
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Abstract

Hypocrisy is a common feature of political scandal. Yet, it is unclear how individuals evaluate hypocritical misconduct differently based on a transgressing politician’s partisan identity. Using survey experiments, this article assesses how exposure to different frames of wrong doing involving actual members of congress spill over on to the evaluation of parties distinctly among co-partisans and out-partisans. I find that Republicans feel more positive towards their party after reading about the resignation of a hypocritical co-partisan politician compared to merely reading about the politician’s hypocrisy. In addition, Republicans feel warmer about their party when reading about a hypocritical versus non-hypocritical out-party transgression. However, Democrats do not change their party evaluations after being exposed to different scandal frames involving co-partisan and out-partisan politicians. This suggests that Republicans and Democrats have different attitudes towards hypocrisy and/or differently apply information about individuals when evaluating parties.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 74 - 87
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

Funding was made possible by the Research on Individuals, Politics, and Society (RIPS) Lab at Vanderbilt University. I would like to thank Cindy Kam, Liz Zechmeister, participants at the RIPS lab, my graduate student colleagues at Vanderbilt, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors at the Journal of Experimental Political Science for their invaluable feedback on previous drafts of this manuscript. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P7RYPP. The author declares no conflict of interest.

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Wolsky Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P7RYPP
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