Search

The Trump-era political environment in the United States is characterized by changes to our information environment, specifically discourse surrounding so-called "fake news," and knowledge of political scandals. We explore whether news trust or knowledge of Trump administration scandals impact individuals' levels of internal, information, and external political efficacy. We find significant and surprising relationships between these measures and political efficacy outcomes. Results contribute to our understanding of how political efficacy is responsive to changes in the political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of right-wing populist parties in Western democracies is often attributed to populists' ability to instrumentalize news media by making deliberate provocations (e.g., verbal attacks on migrants or politicians from other parties) that generate media coverage and public awareness. To explain the success of populists' deliberate provocations, we drew from research on populism and scandal theory to develop a theoretical framework that we tested in two studies examining the rise of German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) between January 2015 and December 2018. In Study 1, an input–output analysis of 17 deliberate provocations by AfD politicians in German news media revealed much more coverage about their attacks on migrants than about their attacks on political elites, although all were covered in predominantly scandalizing ways. Next, Study 2, involving media database research and an analysis of Google Trends data, showed that the provocations had increased overall media coverage about the AfD and influenced public awareness of the party [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern politics is permeated by blame games—symbolic struggles over the blameworthiness or otherwise of various social actors. In this article, we develop a framework for identifying different strategies of blaming that protesters use on social media to criticize and delegitimize governments and political leaders. We draw on the systemic functional linguistic theory of Appraisal to distinguish between blame attributions based on negative judgments of the target's (1) capacity, such as references to their incompetence and policy failures; (2) veracity, questioning their truthfulness or honesty via references to deceitful character or dishonest acts and utterances; (3) propriety, questioning their moral standing by references to, for instance, corruption; and (4) tenacity, suggesting that the politicians are not dependable due to, for example, dithering. We add to this a further threefold distinction based on whether blaming is focused on the target's (1) bad character, (2) bad behavior, or (3) negative outcomes that the target either caused or did not prevent from happening. To illustrate the approach, we analyze a corpus of replies by Twitter users to tweets by British government ministers about two highly contentious issues, Covid-19 and Brexit, in 2020–2021. We suggest that the methodology outlined here could provide a useful avenue for systematically revealing and comparing a variety of realizations of blaming in large datasets of online conflict talk, thereby providing a more fine-grained understanding of the practices of protest and delegitimation in modern politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black municipal leaders are routinely accused of using race and racism to sidestep allegations that they have run afoul the ethics of public office. That is, they use racial defenses to respond to what they view as racist attacks against them. This type of race-based account has been treated as commonplace in American politics, but its effectiveness as a political account has received little scholarly attention. For example, how effective is the racial defense at minimizing negative political fallout for scandalized Black politicians? Using data from a survey experiment, I test how Black Americans respond to the political accounts profferred by Black elected officials accused of official misconduct. I show that a strategy involving a racial defense can yield positive evaluations in terms of trait judgment and voter intention, while offering no comment reduces participant suspicion about investigative malfeasance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a quantitative content analysis, this study examines how varying online communicative behaviors are connected to news characteristics of focus, tone, and media framing of crisis communication during the South Korean Candlelight Revolution that led to the ouster of former President Park in 2017. This work suggests that, when the news stance was positive toward or the focus was on Park, Koreans were more active in showing disapproval through comments posted and anger expressed; when the news stance was negative toward Park or the focus was anti-Park, Koreans were more tacitly supportive, clicking likes more. This work also suggests that news media performed active frame-setting of Park's crisis-response strategies by presenting more defensive strategies than accommodative ones. Publics' news consumption of media-framed defensive crisis-response strategies tended to elicit more active online public engagement than when such media framing was absent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regime theorists have developed typologies that characterize a range of potential regimes. There has been little investigation of regime change, the transformational process by which one regime type is replaced with a different regime. This research hypothesizes that political corruption scandals create propitious conditions for regime change. Using three U.S. urban case studies, we show that scandals destabilized dominant regimes and led to their replacement by new regimes characterized by both alternative electoral coalitions and alternative patterns of political and economic distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]