Scandal: Political

Abstract

This article presents political scandal as a particular form of scandal, highlights the relation between political scandal and the media, and traces the rise of political scandal from the sixteenth century to the start of the twenty-first century. The concept of scandal has a long history, but its modern use is primarily to refer to a series of actions and events that involve certain kinds of transgressions which, when they become known to others, are regarded as sufficiently serious to elicit a response of disapproval or condemnation. A political scandal is conceptualized as a scandal involving individuals or actions which are situated in a political field. We can distinguish between three main types of political scandal: sex scandals, financial scandals and ‘power scandals.’ Political scandals are often interwoven with mediated forms of communication, since the media play a crucial role in making public the actions or events which lie at the heart of scandal and in expressing disapproval of them. The use of ‘scandal’ and its cognates was relatively common in the pamphlet culture of early modern Europe, but the rise of political scandal as a mediated event was largely a development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.