Scandal

Once, it was thought, a scandal was the kiss of death for a political career. Today, however, surviving scandal seems to be the norm. Donald Trump has weathered—and even perhaps benefited from—controversies that would have been unimaginable for virtually any other candidate. Prominent figures in both parties have won elections and remained in office despite credible allegations of wrongdoing. Do scandals still matter? When and why do voters punish politicians or give them a free pass?

Charting the changes from Watergate to the present, this book is a rigorous and compelling investigation of the politics of scandals. Bringing together wide-ranging survey data, innovative experiment design, and historical analysis, Brandon Rottinghaus demonstrates how political polarization, affective partisanship, fading trust in media, and the spread of misinformation have diminished the resonance of controversies. Although scandals still fell many politicians, there is a clear trend over time for fewer voters to be swayed by them. In a polarized world, scandals take only a modest toll on politicians’ approval ratings, survival in office, ambitions, and legacies. In many cases, partisans accept—or even embrace—misbehavior from members of their own party and revel in scandals affecting the opposing party. Challenging conventional wisdom with extensive data, this book illuminates the declining significance of scandals and the consequences for democratic accountability.

Contributor: Brandon Rottinghaus Brandon Rottinghaus is associate professor and Senator Don Henderson Scholar in political science at the University of Houston. He is the author of The Provisional Pulpit (Texas, 2010), The Institutional Effects of Executive Scandal (Cambridge, 2015), and Inside Texas Politics (Oxford, 2015).

Rottinghaus tackles a complex, even explosive question: Why (and how) are some politicians able to survive scandals in this partisan age while others fall? He does so with clearheaded analysis, thorough and deep scrutiny, and a keen eye toward real-world politics. It’s a masterful job, well executed, by a major scholar who is at the top of his game. This may not be the final word on how politicians handle scandals, but it is clearly the best work we have to date. --- Might scandals serve as a litmus test for American politics? Brandon Rottinghaus argues so. In this illuminating account, he shows that scandals bite hardest when our politics are reasonably healthy—when systems of accountability still function. But when polarization deepens and those systems falter, scandals—all too common in American life—cease to derail political careers. Unpunished scandals, we come to appreciate, stand as markers of democratic decay.