Political Scandals Research Articles

A tale of two cities: regulating lobbying through public and private instruments in Brussels and Washington D.C

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between public (i.e. government-led) and private (i.e. industry-led) forms of lobby regulation, by inquiring over the conditions that render a mix between these two regulatory forms more likely. Drawing on the governance of professions scholarship, it presents a theoretically informed comparison between two jurisdictions—the US (federal level) and the EU (supranational level)—where the public regulation of lobbying is built on different models, namely a command-and-control model based on legally binding rules in the US and a cooperative model based on incentives and rewards in the EU. Findings show that, although formal public–private regulatory mixes are not present in either jurisdiction, the EU regulators have hewn closer to this arrangement by coopting lobbyists’ professional associations as semi-permanent but unofficial governance ‘allies’. This outcome is due to an amalgam of factors, chief among which is the severity of political scandals involving lobbyists, which affects policymakers’ reputational incentives for framing the public regulation of lobbying as a punitive or cooperative intervention. Methodologically, the article uses a combination of documentary analysis and expert interviews with lobby practitioners and public regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Construction of a Hybrid Media Storm: A Belgian Case Study

ABSTRACT In today's hybrid media system, amplified news events rage not only in “older” media such as legacy media but also on “newer” digital platforms such as online alternative news media outlets and social media. However, the role of both legacy news media and digital platforms in constructing events has been little explored. This study examines a hybrid media storm surrounding a Belgian political scandal in 2021. Based on a quantitative content analysis of 1,436 print and online articles from six Flemish newspapers and the public broadcaster’s website, 204 articles from three right-leaning alternative media, and 801 tweets between 1 February and 31 October 2021, the study reveals that digital platforms allow actors with little or no voice in legacy news media to influence the narrative of events on those platforms by actively promoting specific frames. Right-leaning alternative media's coverage, although less pluralistic than legacy media, still offers a broader frame repertoire than Twitter where the framing is one-sided. The case study shows that right-leaning alternative media and Twitter do not necessarily broaden the range of views, but are often a crucial factor in the amplification of specific frames at the expense of others.

An Analysis of Leadership and Political Scandals under the Trump Administration: 2017 - 2021

An Analysis of Leadership and Political Scandals under the Trump Administration: 2017 - 2021

The Foundations Of A Nation’s Existence In Maghakia Ormanyan’s Arguments

It is an obvious philosophical truth that people turn to eternal, unchanging values when they find themselves in uncertain, crisis or declining situations during historical and political scandals, as well as in the periods preceding violent cultural-civilizational movements, when in the search for new value orientations, the foundations of national existence, the universal essence of existence, universal principles of existence, reflections on human existence, self-interpretation and worldview become primary. Discussions of the problem of practical philosophy are also activated on the basis of theoretical concepts. These universal patterns are also characteristic of the Armenian reality. In particular, in the process of searching for possible ways of solving the Armenian Question in Western Armenia at the end of the 19th century, the scientific and philosophical analyzes of the genealogy of the Armenian nation, the factors of preserving the national identity, and the legality and justice of the reform of the political existence were important.

Making sense of state violence: understanding public inquiries as political devices

ABSTRACT Whenever a political scandal or controversy erupts, one is likely to hear a familiar demand: ‘There must be a public inquiry!’. Inquiries are institutions of last resort, instigated only when something has gone wrong or must be urgently done, where the usual mechanisms of the state are found wanting. Often the focus of inquiries has been that which the state claims as its monopoly: the use of violence. There is a long and chequered history of inquiries appointed to investigate the state’s use of violence in (post)colonial contexts, military interventions and police actions. This special issue interrogates this history, contributing to wider debates in Critical Military Studies on war and violence. Inquiries are acts of epistemic sovereignty that seek to establish authoritative interpretations of events, and this has sometimes led to a dichotomous representation of inquiries as either promising fora for democratic accountability or tools for elite interests. This special issue seeks to overcome this dichotomy through interdisciplinary dialogue and a granular examination of the political cultures and epistemic practices of inquiries into state violence. In so doing, these articles offer a nuanced analysis of the political functions of inquiries and their potential for democratic accountability and justice.

Equilibrium communication in political scandals

We present a formal model in which elite communication and voters’ beliefs during a political scandal emerge as a communication equilibrium, determined by the severity of the accusations and the degree of media scrutiny. The prediction of our model is that incumbents’ use of denials can garner support even when they face the possibility of evidence showing their guilt. In contrast, public apologies increase approval – compared to denial – only when accusations are not very serious and are likely to be proved. Results from a large survey experiment corroborate these predictions. In order to explore how changes in the information environment shapes the communication equilibrium, we estimate the structural parameters of our model and conduct counterfactual simulations. We find that increasing media scrutiny leads to asymmetric effects on incumbent communication with politicians who are the best at covering up evidence actually benefiting from increased scrutiny.

MRME-Net: Towards multi-semantics learning and long-tail problem of efficient event detection from social messages

Discovering trending social events (e.g., major meetings, political scandals, natural disasters, etc.) from social messages is vital because it emphasizes important events and can help people comprehend the world. However, the heterogeneous semantics enrichment, severe long-tail problems, and sparse text contents of social messages pose great challenges to event detection, often leading to limited generalization ability and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Relational Meta-Enhanced Network (MRME-Net) architecture to learn social events. First, we model social messages into a multi-relational message graph, incorporating abundant meta-semantics along with various meta-relations. Second, we present a multi-relational graph attention network based on Sophia by using a dual-step message aggregation mechanisms to capture the local features of neighboring messages and global semantics of mutiple relations and ultimately learn social message embeddings. We use Sophia optimizer to reduce the massive time and cost of training. Third, in order to address the long-tail problem, we introduce a locally-adapted meta-learning framework in social event detection for the first time and propose a novel META-TAILENH embedding enhancement strategy to refine tail node embeddings in multi-relational graph. Eventually, we conduct the detection of social events according to the hierarchical clustering algorithm. Extensive experiments have been carried out to evaluate MRME-Net on the MAVEN and Twitter dataset, revealing a notable improvement of 3 %–13 %, 4 %–20 % and 6 %–30 % increases on NMI, AMI and ARI in the social event detection task.

The Greater Effects of Sexual Harassment: A Conjoint Analysis Assessing Variation in Political Scandal Effects on Candidate Evaluations in the UK

The Greater Effects of Sexual Harassment: A Conjoint Analysis Assessing Variation in Political Scandal Effects on Candidate Evaluations in the UK

On the Defensive: Identity, Language, and Partisan Reactions to Political Scandal.

We investigated how individuals judge politicians embroiled in scandal. Drawing on social identity and realistic group conflict theory, we predicted that beyond an overall ingroup bias, partisans would be particularly forgiving of in-party politicians who denied or justified their misconduct rather than apologize for it. By insisting that they did nothing wrong, these politicians defend the public image of their party and signal their commitment to partisan goals. We find qualified support for this prediction across three experiments. Participants did not respond negatively to in-party politicians who apologized but did react more positively to those who denied or justified wrongdoing (relative to silence). These accounts worked only for in-party politicians and were more effective for those whose misconduct furthered their party's agenda or whose seat was high-status or pivotal for party goals. In intergroup contexts like politics, people may accept explanations for misconduct that they would otherwise find offensive.

Loyalties and interests: How political motivations influence voters’ responses to scandals

Scandals have always been a highly salient problem in politics. In judging politicians for their misconduct, voters may arguably be biased – they may evaluate scandals based on individual motivations, such as partisanship and self-interested concerns. In this paper, we examine these two considerations in the case of two real-world corruption scandals involving a single incumbent government. In addition to testing for the effects of partisan motivations in authentic situations, we consider how scandals associated with policy goals interact with personal motivations, shaping the degree to which people penalize a scandalous government. Across two survey experiments that prime respondents about real-world corruption scandals, we manipulate question wording for some participants and measure their evaluations of a scandalous leader's performance. We find an effect for self-interested concerns when the benefits associated with the scandal are concentrated and tangible. Our findings suggest that voters hold public figures accountable for misbehaviour and that there are limits to partisan loyalties in political scandals.

Crooked: The Roaring ’20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, A Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal by Nathan Masters (review)

Crooked: The Roaring ’20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, A Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal by Nathan Masters (review)

Journalists’ Perception of the Threats and Risks of Corruption in Institutions and the Media

Corruption scandals have been constantly present in the Spanish media in recent years. The public stays informed about these events through the media, so the way in which journalists cover them, as well as their perception of this problem –which threatens and endangers society– as regards the institutions and the media themselves, is of great important. This article addresses this issue using a representative survey, conducted between March and July 2023, of 391 Spanish journalists belonging to media outlets of different sizes and platforms from across the country. Journalists were asked about the perceived level of corruption in different public institutions, their level of institutional trust, and their degree of agreement with a variety of statements about corruption and the media. After performing a descriptive and inferential statistical analysis of the data collected, the results showed that journalists see corruption as one of the main problems in Spain, with a definitively higher incidence in political institutions compared with other public institutions. In addition, it was found that, the greater the perception of an institution’s corruption, the greater the journalists’ distrust of that institution, thus confirming the dysfunctional thesis of political scandals. Finally, it was revealed that, for journalists, the watchdog role is theoretically essential, but it is not carried out in practice owing to the commercial logic that has been embraced by the Spanish media

#VacunatorioVip. Aproximación al estudio de los escándalos de corrupción en Twitter (ahora X)

In February 2021, Argentina became embroiled in a political corruption scandal known as #VacunatorioVip, which emerged in the context of the covid-19 vaccination campaign. This commotion became a focal point of public debate and engagement on Twitter (now X), highlighting the intersection between political scandal, corruption, pandemic, and the role of Twitter as a digital public-media space. Taking this case, we propose to study how Twitter has transformed the dynamics of corruption scandals in the public sphere by studying internet users, narratives, and network topology. Using a mixed methodological approach that incorporates digital methodologies, we aim to contribute to the reflection on the impact of Twitter in shaping and amplifying corruption scandals.

The reputational costs of connections to controversial politicians: Evidence from political scandals

AbstractWe use the exogenous nature of political scandals to test whether political connections in the form of campaign contributions expose firms to reputational risk. We hand‐collect a sample of 218 scandals of members of the U.S. Congress that occurred between 2000 and 2019 and estimate the abnormal returns around the day a scandal first appeared in the news. We find that connected firms and to a lesser extent other politically active firms experience value losses around corruption scandals involving firms or lobbyists. These losses increase in managers’ propensity to engage in unethical behavior. Moreover, we find that following such corruption scandals, media sources release negative news about connected firms, shareholders of connected firms are more likely to submit proposals on the disclosure of political contributions, and connected firms reduce political spending. Overall, our results suggest that losses around scandals are driven by reputation spillover and investors updating their beliefs about the risks of political contributions.

The Art of Self-Criticism: How Autocrats Propagate Their Own Political Scandals

ABSTRACT In liberal democracies, journalists can engage the government by unearthing its scandals. Authoritarian regimes, where negative news about the government is heavily guarded, lack this process. Yet, rulers in China do propagate political scandals about themselves. Why? I theorize that they do so to engage citizens with propaganda and strategically control their risk with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). I test my theory by analyzing a novel dataset of news stories and reader comments posted by Chinese citizens over the course of China’s anticorruption campaign between 2012 and 2015. My findings show that users’ comments about stories of corrupt national officials were unexpectedly lower than those about lower-ranking officials. Such irregularity suggests that either algorithms or censorship suppressed comments on national-level corruption, which indicates the ruler’s uneasiness toward propagating scandals that may implicate themselves. I also find that China’s rulers reduce their risks by outsourcing reports of their scandals to media outlets less closely linked to the state. My findings show that advancements in ICT and increasing competition among new media firms can help authoritarian rulers finetune their propaganda by promoting self-damaging political messages.

Meming up the Scandals

This research investigates the amplifying role of memes in political scandals. This study, therefore, begins with the hypothesis that political scandals originating from mainstream media extend to social networks through memes. Consequently, the duration and impact of a specific scandal are extended as it circulates within these online platforms. The case study examines three Croatian news portals – Večernji.hr, Index.hr, and Slobodnadalmacija.hr – and analyzes memes published on the Megatroll Split Facebook page in June 2022. Findings indicate that despite a smaller number of memes generated within a two-day timeframe, the Megatroll Split Facebook page received more user engagement than Večernji. hr, which published sixteen articles over eight days. This research confirms the significant role of memes in political scandals and underscores the need for further exploration in this area.

Scandals in the Global Village

The specific characteristics of political scandals in a global context follow the historical evolution of international communication technologies and media systems. This article examines the development of political scandals through selected cases in a global context. The global scandal evolution took place in three phases: (1) the written duplication of morals created the conditions for international reports on political scandals; (2) the establishment of an international media system transformed political scandals into an integral part of global public spheres; (3) the digitization of scandals on the Internet put moral pressure on global politics – resulting in permanent and omnipresent international scandal discourses. The digitization of political scandals comes, on the one hand, along with the loss of journalistic gatekeepers, post-truth manipulation of public spheres, influence from abroad and the risk of social unrest. On the other hand, it provides the chance to better understand the chances and limits of globalization.

From Questionable Incident to Political Scandal

Political scandals have become an everyday phenomenon, among other things, due to the crucial role of social media platforms as they shape how scandals unfold, are reported upon by journalists, and are perceived by the audience. This article examines the process of scandalization and journalistic discourse on Twitter in Germany and Austria against the background of the so-called Ibiza affair. Through a critical discourse analysis of 885 tweets from 149 influential political journalists, this study seeks to add to the understanding of scandalization on Twitter. Building upon the functional phase model by Burkhardt (2015, 2018), the study finds that those previously identified phases of a (political) scandal in print media coverage are shortened on Twitter, indicating a different scandalization dynamic on social media.

‘Accidental Celebrities’

Using quantitative analysis, we analyzed the coverage of women indirectly involved in four major U.S. presidential scandals (Watergate, Iran-Contra, Clinton-Lewinsky affair, Ukraine quid pro quo) through 258 articles published in six magazines (The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Time, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Rolling Stone) to assess how they are described by journalists. Three assumptions guided our analysis. First, women are covered in a negative way even if they are not responsible for the scandal. Second, they are covered by the magazines in a stereotypical way to describe their behavior, their character, or their role in the scandal. Finally, the coverage of women involved in more recent scandals is less stereotypical and less negative. While the literature shows that women receive more negative coverage than men when they are responsible for political scandals, our results show that this is also the case for these “accidental celebrities”.

The Politician, the Party, and the President: How Do Political Scandals Propagate Across the Party Network?

The Politician, the Party, and the President: How Do Political Scandals Propagate Across the Party Network?