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Governance is well recognized as shifting boundaries of responsibilities for doing things among key partners. What is less clear is how exactly power relations are altered and where power is concentrated as new forms of governance emerge. In our article we use the concept of policy post-exceptionalism to critically assess ‘Going for Growth’, a strategic action plan that, until the recent past, underpinned the Northern Ireland agri-food industry. The agri-food sector has an important and prominent role in the Northern Ireland economy. The Going for Growth strategy illustrates how particular interests within the sector are supported by government, as demonstrated through the Renewable Heat Initiative and a scheme promoting anaerobic digestors. Using policy post-exceptionalism to scrutinize the strategy, our research shows what can go wrong when a transition to post-exceptionalism occurs. While Going for Growth purported to represent the wider interests that one might expect to find in a post-exceptionalist approach to agri-food governance, in fact the concentration of power with corporate actors left little space for the inclusion of wider interests. We conclude that this strategy represented a move towards tense post-exceptionalism, creating at least one political scandal, raising questions of legitimacy and transparency and fundamentally undermining political viability of wider government. It is an extreme case of what can happen when post-exceptionalist policymaking goes wrong., Highlights • The agri-food sector assumes a central role in Northern Ireland (NI) policymaking. • NI's Going for Growth strategy represents a part-shift policy post-exceptionalism. • Private agri-food interests have benefitted significantly from public subsidy. • Going for Growth concentrated power in the hands of a few strategic agri-food actors.

This article examines the issue of evasion in mediatized political interviews in the context of right-wing populist politics. As public figures, politicians are held accountable not only for their actions but also for their prior statements. Such ‘metalingual accountability’ applies to public contexts as well as utterances made in more private situations. Based on a case-study analysis of leaked conversations with a local populist politician and a subsequent follow-up media interview, the article identifies several metapragmatic strategies that are available to interviewees aiming to evade and deny utterances originally made in the backstage region. The findings indicate that equivocation and evasiveness arise from the politicians' need to mitigate the degree of face threat. This need is particularly acute where backstage honesty can lead to frontstage scandal, as in racist comments against certain ethnic groups, whereby the speaker's status as a publically acceptable politician is in danger.

How does the public evaluate politicians' reactions to crises that damage their party's image? Using an experimental survey design and the 2016 South Korean political scandal, we explore which strategies allow politicians to avoid electoral accountability for corruption in their party. The scandal prompted some politicians from the president's party to participate in protests calling for her impeachment, make statements criticizing her leadership, or join a new splinter party. We find that all of these strategies both increase electoral support and decrease perceptions of corruption. However, leaving the party is the least successful at increasing electability and politicians are more likely to gain votes if instead they take a clear position against corrupt politicians. Our findings have implications for accountability in weakly institutionalized party systems, where politicians, faced with a party brand crisis, have incentives to switch parties to escape electoral consequences, as opposed to reforming the party from within.

In this study we investigate the relationship between political corruption and corporate social responsibility (CSR) strengths. We provide evidence that firms situated in U.S. states with higher levels of corruption exhibit poorer CSR strengths. Our results survive an array of robustness and endogeneity tests. We identify a positive (negative) effect on a firm’s CSR reporting or disclosure practices (the rater’s assessment of the firm’s CSR activities and policies) after state-level exogenous shocks from political scandal revelations for firms headquartered in the scandal states. We show that firms with higher political connections obtained through campaign contributions rely less on CSR strengths for a given level of corruption. Additionally, we find that the influence of corruption on CSR is larger than that of other traditional external societal norms, namely, social capital and religiosity.

Models of political risk predict that increases in political uncertainty cause stock prices to fall, especially for politically sensitive firms. We use the event of the Bo Xilai political scandal in 2012 in China as an exogenous shock to identify the impact of political uncertainty on asset prices. We document that the Bo scandal caused a significant drop in stock prices, especially for firms that are more politically sensitive. Further analysis shows that the stock price drop is mainly driven by a change in discount rate, providing strong support for the existence of priced political risk.

We study a model that characterizes the conditions under which past misbehavior becomes the subject of present scandal, with consequences for both the implicated politician and the parties that work with him. In the model, both authentic and fake scandals arise endogenously within a political framework involving two parties that trade off benefits of continued collaboration with a suspect politician against the possibility of reputational fallout. Rising polarization between the two parties, we show, increases the likelihood of scandal while decreasing its informational value. Scandals that are triggered by only the opposing party, we also find, are reputationally damaging to both parties and, in some instances, reputationally enhancing to the politician. The model also reveals that jurisdictions with lots of scandals are not necessarily beset by more misbehavior. Under well‐defined conditions, in fact, scandals can be a sign of political piety.

Under what conditions do self-serving political elites choose to engage in `war on truth' (WOT)? We build on existing insights, which maintain that WOT promotes withdrawal and skepticism among voters, to show that seeding mistrust is one strategy for altering the information environment of the public. We build a formal model in which elites push the strategy when evidence on a policy issue goes against them such as during a political scandal. We characterize the `WOT trade-off' faced by panderers: immobilizing voters locks in the status quo and thereby prevents the public from enacting policy change the elite dislikes but it also undermines future policy changes the elite may in fact like. We draw on a number of illustrations from discourse pushed by the Kremlin on Western media markets and from the informational environment in ``diminished’’ democracies to demonstrate how our argument explains variation in the occurrence and intensity of conspiracy-pandering, one notable WOT strategy.

A simple computer model describing the influence of a political scandal on a voting process in a two-party society, is presented. We discuss the role of three parameters charactering a scandal — its magnitude (volume of coverage in the media), time it occupies place in the media and the openness of the society. We show that the dependence of the magnitude of a scandal needed for the opposition to take power on the parameters of the model exhibits two regimes — fast and slow changes. Increasing presence of a scandal in the media for a very long time, as well as increasing the openness of the society might not produce a noticeably different effects than a shorter one. Comparison of the model with the data for president Nixon support during the Watergate affair, shows reasonably good agreement.

We investigate a case of political favoritism in which members of the Bavarian parliament hired relatives as office employees who were paid using taxpayers' money. The family scandal was a much-discussed issue in the German media because of upcoming state and federal elections. Being involved in the scandal had no apparent effect on re-election prospects or voter turnout: for example, the total vote share of the reigning CSU increased from 47% in the 2008 election to 50% in the 2013 election in districts whose representatives were revealed to have hired relatives, resembling party gains elsewhere. Voters did not appear to punish the incumbent government. The CSU embodies Bavarian identity and was able to overcome the family scandal, as also had been the case in previous scandals.

How do politicians react to a political earthquake? In this article, we study politicians’ – rather than voters’ – responses to the main political scandal in Italian recent history (Tangentopoli), and overcome endogeneity concerns by analysing the local implications of this national corruption scandal. We find that local politicians withdraw support for incumbents in parties hit by Tangentopoli – inducing early government terminations in such municipalities. Moreover, politicians in parties hit by the scandal exhibit higher rates of party switching and lower re-running rates. By decreasing the value of the party “brand”, scandals thus become transmitted across politicians and levels of government via partisan cues.

In behavioral experiments, individuals are less likely to cheat at a task when the saliency of dishonesty is increased [Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008), Gino, Ayal, and Ariely (2009)]. We test a similar hypothesis in a real world setting by treating news about high-profile political scandals as shocks to the salience of unethical/illegal behavior and its consequences. We find that local corporate insiders engage in fewer suspect behaviors in the year after a political scandal is revealed. Their stock sales are less profitable and they are less likely to sell stock ahead of large price declines, suggesting less illegal insider trading. These patterns vary predictably with the level of media attention to scandal-related events during the scandal years. Locally headquartered firms also appear to engage in less earnings management following the revelation of a political scandal. However, these changes in executives’ behaviors appear to be largely transitory and the evidence of suspect behaviors resumes in following years.

Nyhan (2015) has pointed to the lack of a good definition of political scandal, that many are too focused on evidence and not on the larger picture of context. He attempts to bring together some prior definitions to fit a study of the effects of media coverage on scandal. What is still missing, however, is a definition of scandal that applies more broadly to its inclusion in what Thompson (2008) calls ―the larger audience‖ beyond more traditional media coverage. How do we account for why some scandals capture the imagination of that larger audience better than others? Further, what makes some scandals a better fit for more contemporary, non-traditional forms of media? This paper is a first step at trying to find that definition and how it leads to the "pop culturization" of scandal.

Aids and public communication: the state and its experts. Two successive strategies of public communication on AIDS are analysed in order to understand the way the authorities resort to two convergent although competing forms of expertise: research in social sciences and NGOs (non-governmental organisations). In 1989, the first strategy had the fight against stigmatisation as main objective. The purpose was to prevent both discrimination against gay men and against people living with AIDS. The trend was the “universalisation” of an illness presented as “concerning everybody” in the same way. The NGOs were focused on the same objective as were the small number of researchers working on AIDS whose advises were sought from by the authorities. In fact, public administration, research and NGOs were not impervious worlds. They were communicating with each other and some people belong to two or three of them simultaneously or successively, playing the role of “smugglers” between them. Accordingly, discourse, analyses, ways of conceiving action were common to these different institutions. As the researches in social sciences rapidly increased in volume and produced significant data for public communication, the references to them became predominant during the implementation of the second strategy in 1994. Again, their conclusion were convergent with the advises of the NGOs whose claims increased. One of them, Act Up, exerted its lobbying action not only on the authorities, but also on the institution in charge of the realisation of the campaigns, the advertising agency. This led in summer 1995 to the most daring campaign ever launched in France. As it was issued in a climate of political scandal provoked by this NGO, it had a huge impact. However the authorities, put in a double bind situation by Act Up, decided afterwards to face both the consequences of their public communication policy and the demands of the NGOs and to take on their choices. Therefore, the influence of the latter started to decline.

This is a history of one of the most famous trials in American history, as well as political scandal and a personal tragedy for the litigants. The article takes the reader through Congressional hearings in 1948, a libel suit, grand jury proceedings, two criminal jury trials, and appeals that ended only in the 1980s. The litigation strategies, evidence, legal rulings, and courtroom advocacy of both sides are examined in detail. Also described are what did not come out in the trials and the political impact of all these proceedings, as well as elite and public opinion about who was telling the truth.

The Chongqing Incident happened in China since February 2012 is a scandal that has captivated huge domestic and international attention. Combining two-dimensional measurement scheme and computer-assisted text analysis, this study focuses on the comparative framing analysis of news coverage of Chongqing Incident in prominent U.S. and U.K. newspapers with theoretical lens of new institutionalism. The findings revealed that the newspapers in the U.S. and U.K. adopt similar style of reporting like the similar approach in presenting the news and the prominence of “present” in time dimension. Secondly, although there is strong convergence of the news coverage in the two countries, the U.S. newspapers mainly employed the “past-individual” frame, while the U.K. newspapers were more engaged in “future-country” frame. Thirdly, The U.S. newspapers and the U.K. newspapers vary in their frame-changing over the life-span of the news, demonstrating different political interests and political communication cultures between these two democracies.

Contemporary media bring us news of wars, political scandal, ecological disasters, space explorations, religious edicts, economic good or bad news and major league sports scores. These appear to be humanity's most pressing issues. But beneath these issues lies a pervasive matter, an issue close to, but inhibited from, the conscious mind and the feeling heart of most humans—the spectre of possible human extinction. It has been pointed out time and again by individuals and scientific groups that exponential population and industrial growth leads directly to the end of planet Earth's ability to sustain human life. It seems that we do not know how to stop this growth, so we do not talk about it. A troubleshooter concludes that we could learn to talk about it, and we could stop this insidious growth.