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Scandals are an unfortunate, but important, part of the political world. We examine how citizen perceptions of politicians involved in scandals are conditional upon two important factors: the politician’s gender and their decision to provide a justification for the scandal. Using experimental evidence, we find that justification of a scandal increases perceptions of competence for politicians, regardless of gender, but only increases perceptions of likability for women. We find, additionally, that the effect of gender is conditional on political ideology: liberals generally feel more positive toward a woman involved in a scandal, while no difference emerges for conservatives.

In this paper we examine the discourse on political corruption, with a focus on accusations of corruption and the self-defence discourse of the accused person. For this purpose, we study the discourse of the corruption scandal related with the Greek ex-Defence Minister Akis Tsohatzopoulos in 2011, as presented in articles published in the newspaper I Kathimerini. We specifically discuss how the accused is presented in the newspaper, how the accused presents himself and rebuts accusations and the newspaper’s stance, including the recontextualization of his discourse. By using tools of corpus linguistics in combination with Critical Discourse Analysis notions, our analysis points to the discourse strategies used, the extended application of topoi (namely of burden, responsibility, the scapegoat, and reality/appearance) and the biased treatment of the accused’s discourse, which is not only underrepresented but also distorted and ironically treated, suggesting that traditional Press in the Greek context aligns with political parties and the powerful through an array of linguistic devices.

Previous research in political communication has shown that visual news coverage can affect news consumers’ evaluations of political candidates. Yet, so far, the effects of subtle (positive/negative) visual background cues on candidate evaluation remain largely unclear. Also, the role of individuals’ media trust has not been explored in this context. That is, trusting individuals may interpret subtle visual cues in different ways compared with mistrusting individuals. Drawing from theory on visual communication, media trust, and the persuasion knowledge model a quota-based online experiment revealed that media trust moderates the relationship between the exposure to negative visual cues and candidate evaluation in the context of a political scandal. Mistrusting individuals showed more positive candidate evaluations, whereas trusting individuals showed more negative evaluations. Thus, visual background cues can have a polarising effect on citizens’ evaluations of political actors and influence the electorate in very different ways. Implications for journalism practice are discussed.

This study examines how citizens’ social media use may have influenced their participation in highly polarizing protests during the 2016–2017 corruption scandal in South Korea. As social media users mobilize politically by acquiring varied political information from other users, social media use created more incentives for citizens to participate in both pro- and anti-impeachment protests during the scandal. Given that social media is an important arena for political activism, participation in rival protests also influences many motivated protesters to strengthen their side’s voices online. Thus, protests may increase citizens’ political use of social media. Our empirical analysis suggests that social network service use does not influence citizens’ political activities in a unidirectional manner. We have found that social media use and participation in rival protests reciprocally influence each other.

Scandal severity may affect public perceptions of both scandalous political actors and news sources reporting political misconduct. Yet, research that has empirically tested these assumptions is lacking. Drawing from theory on anchoring effects, the results of two experimental studies conducted using mediation analyses revealed that severe scandals hurt politicians (candidate evaluation) and weaken voting intentions. Although non-severe scandals have no such effects, they increased news consumers’ exaggerated scandalization perceptions and indirectly degraded news source evaluations. Severe scandals had no effect on the news source. Implications for the coverage of political scandals are discussed.

In this article, I use the high-profile Bo Xilai case to illustrate the dialectics of media and politics in contemporary China. I start by explaining some of the similarities and key differences between mediatized politics in the West and in China. This leads to an emphasis on the ideological dimension of media logic that is largely missing from discussions derived from a liberal democratic context. I then analyze the dialectics of the mediatized ideological struggle and politicized media logic running through the Bo Xilai scandal. In the last section, I summarize the theoretical contributions that the Chinese case makes to the study of mediatized politics.

Aggregate, survey, and experimental research into political scandal teaches us how the public reacts to revelations of misdeeds on behalf of its elected representatives. One common scenario, however, has been largely overlooked in scandal studies: the effects of hypocrisy in scandal. Examples abound of politicians who campaign on values that they then directly betray with their actions in office. Conventional wisdom, however, holds that such hypocrisy is an unpardonable transgression. We examine whether and how hypocrisy affects public reactions to political scandal and its perpetrators. Using a Quinnipiac University survey experiment, we demonstrate that negative judgments of a hypothetical politician caught in an adulterous relationship not only vary by degree depending on the presence or absence of hypocrisy but that they also vary by type of judgment. Individuals generally react more negatively to politicians in hypocritical scandal situations than nonhypocritical ones. In addition, a hypocritical situation affects public judgments of a politician’s competence in office, above and beyond other judgments, demonstrating an added professional aspect to judgments of scandals when they involve hypocrisy.

Political Scientists have widely explored why legislatures pass campaign finance regulations and how these laws condition the influence of organized interests over elected officials. Studies have not explained how state houses can overcome entrenched interests, to pass more restrictive legislative lobbying laws. Interest group pressure can be overcome when routine politics are impacted by agenda-setting environments and broader state political contexts that prompt the passage of legislative lobbying reforms. Findings suggest that although moralistic political culture and political scandals set the agenda for stricter regulation, the prospects for reform are tempered by the power of organized interests in state houses.

Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vibrant sphere of social media thriving on a largely unfiltered internet. How are these ‘internet scandals’ impacting politics in the semi-authoritarian political environment? To address this and related questions, I juxtapose two case studies of police corruption scandals that erupted in the social media sphere in 2009/2010. Drawing on the findings, I argue that Russia’s ruling elites are presently very much capable of managing these outbursts of public outrage. Mainly with the help of the powerful state-controlled television, public anger is very swiftly redirected towards lower-level authorities and foreign, supposedly hostile powers.

In this article, we use the case of a government scandal in Sweden to develop a theoretical perspective by which to understand the moral nature of political scandals. We draw on insights from Durkheim's sociology of morality and point, inter alia, to the ritual character of scandals. However, in contrast to most Durkheimian readings, the perspective presented does not presume the existence of a moral consensus. The scandal is understood as a confrontation between various systems of norms. Rather than confirming a given moral order, scandals provoke moral positioning and help in clarifying — and dramatizing — lines of difference or conflict. The empirical case studied is a government scandal in Sweden in 2006 (Nannygate) that forced two government ministers to resign after less than 10 days in office when it was revealed that they had not paid their TV licence and, moreover, had bought `black' (untaxed) services. This transgression provoked a massive public reaction at the time.

Comparative research is uniquely able to address theoretical questions about the relationship between journalism and political and cultural contexts. This study takes the reporting of political scandal as the entry-point to an analysis of the practice of investigative reporting in Britain and Spain in the 1990s and its status as a litmus test for a Fourth Estate understanding of the press’ role. Using interview and documentary data, the research explores journalists’ backgrounds, their assumptions about methods, relationships to sources and their perception of the public, political and peer response to their work. Journalists’ views of the rationale for reporting political scandal are also explored. The analysis shows that there are a number of differences between the two groups of journalists but also that they are bound far more by common assumptions about the practices and purposes of reporting political scandal, which, taken together, provide a challenge to certain aspects of the production study research tradition and also evidence for the enduring influence of Fourth Estate understandings of the role of journalism across national contexts.

This article argues that by providing virtually unlimited sources of political information, the new media environment undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: If there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers. The difficulty of elites (political and media both) and academics in understanding the Lewinsky scandal stems from their failure to recognize the increasingly limited ability of journalists to act as gatekeepers. The disjuncture between elite attempts to both control and understand the scandal on one hand and the conclusions the public drew about this political spectacle on other hand speaks to some fundamental changes that have occurred in the role of the press in American society in the late 20th century.

Watergate refers to the political scandal that broke in 1972 and forced Richard M. Nixon to resign as president of the United States 2 years later. It offered a language and framework for public discourse about scandal around the world in the decades since. This article recounts the basic story of Watergate, discusses the impact of Watergate on American politics, and focuses on how comparisons to Watergate shaped the unfolding of later American political scandals, notably Iran-Contra, Whitewater, and Monica Lewinsky. The article concludes by reviewing John Thompson’s sociology of political scandals and argues that scandal, although not peculiar to democracies, has an especially important role in a system of government that encourages distrust of authority.

This article looks at the recent spate of political scandal news, both financial and sexual, in the United Kingdom during the Major and Blair administrations. Scandal revelations, especially those produced by the press, may be due in part to the audience-building strategies of the media. Dissenting views, in contrast, may possibly be offered as a result of the media’s own legitimation needs. Stories of scandal serve to undermine institutions in the public’s mind and can often provoke the setting up of government and parliamentary committees leading to the regulation of particular activities. This article shows how the accumulation of scandal stories may have serious repercussions for the popularity of governments and prime ministers and may influence the representation of all aspects of policy.

This article briefly summarizes the German research literature on scandal and then outlines a theory of scandal as a socially constructed communication pattern. The theory distinguishes macro- and micro-level approaches for addressing the question of which malfunctions a society selects for scandal. The manifest and latent functions of scandals are discussed with special emphasis on the role of the mass media. The authors’concept of scandal is linked to the concept of political culture. The article then reviews, from a comparative cross-national point of view, (a) scandals that were formative for the development of democratic political culture in Germany, (b) scandals that are linked to the particular history of Germany, (c) scandals that do not distinguish Germany from other societies, and (d) scandals that are conspicuously missing in Germany although common in other countries. On this basis, five conclusions are drawn about the relationship of political scandal and political culture.

Jon Marshall, Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011). 313 pages, $24.95 (paperback).Review by Steve HallockThe U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has wasted millions of dollars on "stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them," The Washington Post reported in mid-May of this year. Nationwide, the story continued, "nearly 700 projects awarded $400 million" for housing for the poor "have been idling for years."These findings were the result of a year-long investigation by The Post, whose report on the "squandered" taxpayer money stands as a welcome, but rare, example of the sort of investigative reporting that is the focus of Northwestern University lecturer Jon Marshall's road map to the history-and current state-of investigative reporting in the United States. And therein lies the primary value of this book. It offers a detailed, lavishly sourced chronological account of investigative reporting before and after the Watergate scandal, which Marshall offers up as the gold standard of investigative journalism.The title of the book is somewhat of a misnomer. The so-called legacy of the Watergate scandal reporting that brought down the Nixon administration in the early 1970s-a scandal to which Marshall devotes way too many pages detailing the events and reporting of a story that has been retold many times-doesn't even begin until well past the midway point of the book. This leads to one little problem: Just what is the legacy of this famed political scandal and its effect on the press? Was it the increased use of anonymous sources by a reporting corps eager to emulate the methods of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? Was it the rise of investigative journalism that gave the national press the reputation of a take-no-prisoners arrogance that offended and drove away readers? Was it a boon to investigative techniques that led to a watchdog journalism that benefited the democracy? Or was it a neglect of journalistic duties in response to doubling down by government officials and presidential administrations on secrecy and the erection of impediments to the free flow of information? We get a hint that this last element was Marshall's aim early on, when he writes that each successive presidential administration following Watergate has looked for ways to better shield itself from prying reporters. Like the Nixon administration, the White House of George W. Bush strengthened the power of the executive branch as it responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and prepared for war in Iraq. Like Nixon Bush displayed open disdain toward the press and shrouded the workings of government in a veil of secrecy. In contrast with the Watergate era, however, the press response during much of Bush's time in office was more impotent than heroic.The legacy of this book is a bit of all of the above, actually, but the focus blurs somewhat in Marshall's methodical, impressive and ultimately successful attempt to provide a thorough accounting of the nation's long and impressive history of muckraking and enterprise reporting. But that also is this book's strength. It is a compilation-to the point nearly of annotated bibliography at times-of investigative enterprise that any student or instructor of journalism and its important watchdog role in this nation will find valuable and instructive. …

The boundary between the personal and the political is contested. Feminist interventions in this contest since 1970 have been particularly significant. A brief discussion of how feminists have theorised the personal/political division serves as an introduction to my analysis of current struggles over that division in Western liberal democracies. My analysis focuses on the workings of representative processes. Efforts to represent interests are strongly interlinked with the representation of meanings or images. Representations rely on, even if they resist, dominant discourses which privilege certain meanings and interests over others. To illustrate this analysis I use media representations of the Clinton versus Paula Jones case, which has produced considerable debate about the personal/political boundary. The continued high poll ratings Clinton received at that time suggest that his sexual behaviour was not seen as interfering with his political performance. In contrast, assessments of Jones's political credibility appear considerably tied to evaluations of her `personal' life. The difficulties of representing marginalised gender and class positions within current representative systems are explored in order to account for these differences.

In this article we use the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal to illustrate a fundamental change in the contemporary American media environment: the virtual elimination of the gatekeeping role of the mainstream press. The new media environment, by providing virtually unlimited sources of political information (although these sources do not provide anything like an unlimited number of perspectives), undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: if there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers. This article is part of a larger project in which we argue that alterations in the media environment have eroded the always uneasy distinction between news and entertainment. Overall, this erosion, one result of which is the collapse of the gatekeeping function, is rapidly undermining the commonsense assumptions used by both elites, citizens and scholars to understand the role of the media in a democratic society.

The authors examine the electoral effects of political scandal and redistricting, two conventional wisdom explanations for 1992's higher than usual House turnover. They use the strategic politician theory as a basis for their analysis to examine retirements, primary outcomes, and general election outcomes. The theory assumes that politicians (both incumbents and challengers) behave strategically and will run or not run based on the prevailing political climate. The authors find support for the theory with regard to retirements; embattled incumbents are more likely to retire. Their analysis of the primary and general election outcomes, however, finds mixed support for the theory. Nevertheless, the check scandal and redistricting had a direct impact on the incumbent's vote margin, making the elections more competitive.