Political scandal is a recurring phenomenon that exposes unethical conduct by political officials, leading to calls for reform and impacting citizen trust in government institutions. Scandals are typically highlighted by the media, whose extensive coverage often influences how scandals are perceived and understood by citizens. Moreover, media coverage may indirectly affect and trigger a variety of behavioural responses in politicians that are not directly implicated in the scandal.
This article examines how media coverage of a politician’s involvement in a scandal affects his or her electoral performance, with special focus on whether the effects vary by different types of scandalized actors (politicians or parties). A systematic literature review is used to identify and analyze 228 articles that investigate political scandal and its consequences. A broad range of databases, including Communication & Mass Media Complete, PsycINFO, Political Science Database and Sociological Abstracts/Collection were searched to identify relevant studies.
The results show that a majority of scandal effect studies report negative evaluative effects for involved politicians, and that these effects may be moderated by a number of central moderator variables, including citizens’ prior views/attitudes, general levels of political trust and cynicism, and partisanship. Further, the scope of particular effects appears to vary by country and electoral system.
The article also identifies a number of remaining research gaps. First, a relatively small number of studies have investigated the effect of single-politician scandals on political trust more generally (i.e., trust in politicians who are not involved in the scandal). The few existing experiments that have done so indicate that such scandals do generate negative scandal-spillover effects (e.g., Puente-Diaz, 2015; Schwarz & Bless, 1992, 2007; von Sikorski & Herbst, 2019).
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