Abstract
The 2017 U.S. Senate Special Election in Alabama, which was decided on 12 December 2017, was one of the most contentious and scandal-laden political campaigns in recent memory. The Republican candidate, Roy Moore, gained notoriety during the 2017 campaign when a number of women alleged to national media that as teenagers they were subject to sexual advances by Moore, who was then in his early 30s and serving as a local assistant district attorney. The process and results of this particular election provide the heretofore unexamined impact of political scandal on localism or friends-and-neighbors voting in political contests. Based on data from the 2017 special election in Alabama, econometric results presented here suggest that a candidate who is embroiled in political scandal suffers an erosion in the usual friends-and-neighbors effect on his or her local vote share. In this particular case, the scandal hanging over Moore eroded all of the friends-and-neighbors effect that would have been expected (e.g., about five percentage points) in his home county, as well as about 40% of the advantage Moore had at home over his opponent in terms of constituent political ideology.
Highlights
The 2017 U.S Senate Special Election in Alabama, which was decided on 12 December 2017, encompassed one of the most contentious and scandal-laden political campaigns in recent memory.The election was won by the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones, a lawyer from Birmingham
The present study fills a void in the public choice literature on localism by exploring how political scandal impacts the friends-and-neighbors advantage that typically accrues to local candidates in situations not involving political scandal
Results from a decomposition approach presented in this study suggest that the latter effect prevailed in the 2017 U.S Senate Special Election in Alabama, as the political scandal that hung over Moore during the final weeks of the campaign eroded all the friends-and-neighbors effect that would have been expected in his home county
Summary
The 2017 U.S Senate Special Election in Alabama, which was decided on 12 December 2017, encompassed one of the most contentious and scandal-laden political campaigns in recent memory. Results from a decomposition approach presented in this study suggest that the latter effect prevailed in the 2017 U.S Senate Special Election in Alabama, as the political scandal that hung over Moore during the final weeks of the campaign eroded all the friends-and-neighbors effect that would have been expected (e.g., about five percentage points) in his home county. In this case, the harshness of the political scandal reduced, by about 40%, the advantage Moore had at home over his opponent in terms of constituent political ideology
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