Partisan bias in politicians’ perception of scandals

Nanna Lauritz Schönhage,Benny Geys

doi:10.1177/1354068821998024

Nanna Lauritz Schönhage, Benny Geys

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068821998024

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Abstract

Do politicians perceive scandals differently when they implicate members of their own party rather than another party? We address this question using a between-subject survey experiment, whereby we randomly assign UK local councillors (N = 2133) to vignettes describing a major national-level scandal in their own party versus another party. Our results show that local politicians perceive a significantly larger impact of this national scandal on the national party image when it concerns their own party (relative to another party). When evaluating the same scandal’s impact on the local party image, no similar effect is observed. This suggests that local politicians tone down the local impact of a national scandal more when thinking about their own party. We suggest this derives from a form of motivated reasoning whereby politicians selectively focus on information allowing a more negative view of direct electoral opponents. These findings arise independent of the type of scandal under consideration.

Highlights

Scandals triggered by politicians’ inappropriate, unethical or illegal behaviour can invoke responses from voters (De Vries and Solaz, 2017; Vivyan et al, 2012) as well as the involved politicians (Cavalcanti et al, 2018; Ferraz and Finan, 2008)
This, we argue, has implications for the way politicians perceive scandals occurring in different parties
The results indicate that politicians, unsurprisingly, perceive the impact of a scandal to be more severe at the level of government where the scandal takes place

Summary

Introduction

Scandals triggered by politicians’ inappropriate, unethical or illegal behaviour can invoke responses from voters (De Vries and Solaz, 2017; Vivyan et al, 2012) as well as the involved politicians (Cavalcanti et al, 2018; Ferraz and Finan, 2008). Large-scale scandals generally implicate only a fraction of politicians, and may cause or exacerbate internal divisions within parties (Kam, 2009; Plescia et al, 2020) This raises important questions about how politicians ‘on the sidelines’ of a scandal – including, for instance, colleagues and party leaders (Asquer et al, 2020) – perceive the impact of such events, and whether these perceptions are affected by politicians’ partisan affiliation. It is a priori unclear whether including/avoiding party names is superior, and future research should specify in- and out-group treatments with specific party names to assess this trade-off directly After these vignettes, we asked respondents for their perception of how this scandal influences the image of the affected party at the national as well as the local level.

Background characteristics

Conclusion