Political Scandals Research Articles

Risk Preferences and Misconduct: Evidence from Politicians

When seeking new leaders, business and government organizations alike often need individuals that are less risk averse, or even risk-seeking, in order to improve performance. However, individuals amenable to increased risk-taking may be more likely to engage in misconduct. To study this issue, we explore US political scandals and the implicated politicians’ portfolio choices. We find that a politician allocating all of her portfolio to risky investments has double the odds of being involved in a political sandal compared to a politician allocating all of her portfolio to safe investments. This suggests that those who are more willing to take risks in their personal finances are also more likely to engage in misconduct. We validate portfolio choice as a measure of risk preferences by correlating actual high-stakes investment choices (average $700,000 US) to conventional laboratory lottery choices (average $51 US) of wealthy investors.

Are Sex Scandals Masculinizing? An Examination of the Relationship Between Gender and Political Scandals

Are Sex Scandals Masculinizing? An Examination of the Relationship Between Gender and Political Scandals

Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media Bias through Crowdsourced Content Analysis

It is widely thought that news organizations exhibit ideological bias, but rigorously quantifying such slant has proven methodologically challenging. Through a combination of machine-learning and crowdsourcing techniques, we investigate the selection and framing of political issues in fifteen major US news outlets. Starting with 803,146 news stories published over twelve months, we first used supervised learning algorithms to identify the 14 percent of articles pertaining to political events. We then recruited 749 online human judges to classify a random subset of 10,502 of these political articles according to topic and ideological position. Our analysis yields an ideological ordering of outlets consistent with prior work. However, news outlets are considerably more similar than generally believed. Specifically, with the exception of political scandals, major news organizations present topics in a largely nonpartisan manner, casting neither Democrats nor Republicans in a particularly favorable or unfavorable light. Moreover, again with the exception of political scandals, little evidence exists of systematic differences in story selection, with all major news outlets covering a wide variety of topics with frequency largely unrelated to the outlet’s ideological position. Finally, news organizations express their ideological bias not by directly advocating for a preferred political party, but rather by disproportionately criticizing one side, a convention that further moderates overall differences.

The Political Scandal as a Narrative Experience

The work on the political scandal as a narrative experience seeks to address the relationship between the field of journalism and the narratological categories. We will try to establish a theoretical and conceptual framework of analysis of the media-political scandal, considering the media role in the reconfiguration of the event into intelligible intrigues to the reader. From our point of view, the political scandals are complex narratives that develop in the press, and may be interpreted as "stories" that have a plot, major and minor episodes, characters, and meaning effects inherent to the "plastic work" of the medium in the moment of converting the phenomenon into a media experience. In the final part, we offer the reader a theoretical and conceptual schema of hermeneutic and pragmatic deconstruction of the media scandal, putting in evidence the significant value of scandal and the aesthetics component that it reveals.

Telenovela e Política: perspectivas e modos de abordagem

<p>O artigo pretende apresentar, de maneira não exaustiva, quatro perspectivas teórico-metodológicas para o estudo das relações entre telenovela e política, ressaltando situações em que a narrativa ficcional: a) é utilizada como constituidora do Cenário de Representação da Política; b) é utilizada para dar forma a escândalos políticos; c) traz temas polêmicos e acontecimentos da política cotidiana e institucional, gerando um debate público ampliado; d) oferece valores e padrões de conduta moral que permitem aos telespectadores posicionar seus dramas pessoais cotidianos em termos que fazem sentido coletivamente. Ao final propõe-se avaliar como a narrativa ficcional da telenovela apresenta-se, sobretudo, como universo imagético e argumentativo com potência política de promover desidentificação e revelar cenas polêmicas de enunciação.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>

Empire of tea: the Asian leaf that conquered the world

Tea has a rich and well-documented past. The beverage originated in Asia long before making its way to seventeenth-century London, where it became an exotic, highly sought-after commodity. Over the subsequent two centuries, tea's powerful psychoactive properties seduced British society, becoming popular across the nation from castle to cottage. Now the world's most popular drink, tea was one of the first truly global products to find a mass market, with tea drinking now stereotypically associated with British identity. The delicate flavour profile and hot preparation of tea inspired poets, artists and satirists. Tea was embroiled in controversy, from the gossip of the domestic tea table to the civil disorder occasioned by smuggling and the political scandal of the Boston Tea Party. Based on extensive original research, and now available in paperback, Empire of Tea provides a rich cultural history that explores how the British `way of tea' became the norm across the Anglophone world.

Recovering from Political Scandal: Why Weiner Failed and Barry Stays Strong

Recovering from Political Scandal: Why Weiner Failed and Barry Stays Strong

Assessing the Impact of Political Scandals on Attitudes toward Democracy: Evidence from Canada's Sponsorship Scandal

AbstractSatisfaction with the workings of democracy seems to have declined in Canada, as it has in other established democracies. Political scandals are one frequently invoked explanation for that shift. But there is substantial scholarly disagreement about whether political scandals undermine democratic satisfaction. This paper uses evidence from a conveniently timed round of the CES (Canadian Election Study) from 2004, as well as the CES panel from 2004 and 2006, to explore this relationship more definitively than is usually possible. The results indicate that the scandal eroded satisfaction with the way democracy works but did not undermine support for democracy more generally.

Fortunes and misfortunes of political leaders reflected in the eyes of their electors.

Gaze-following is a pivotal social behaviour that, although largely automatic, is permeable to high-order variables like political affiliation. A few years ago we reported that the gaze of Italian right-wing voters was selectively captured by the gaze of their leader Silvio Berlusconi. This effect was particularly evident in voters who saw themselves as similar to Berlusconi. Two years later, we were able to run the present follow-up study because Berlusconi's popularity had drastically dropped due to sex and political scandals, and he resigned from office. In a representative subsample of our original group, we investigated whether perceived similarity and gaze-following reflected Berlusconi's loss in popularity. We were also able to test the same hypothesis in an independent group of right-wing voters when their leader, Renata Polverini, resigned as Governor of 'Regione Lazio' due to political scandals. Our results show that the leaders' fall in popularity paralleled the reduction of their gaze's attracting power, as well as the decrease in similarity perceived by their voters. The less similar right-wing voters felt to their leader, the less they followed his/her gaze. Thus, the present experimental findings suggest that gaze-following can be modulated by complex situational and dispositional factors such as leader's popularity and voter-leader perceived similarity.

An Examination of Seven Sociopolitical Factors and Their Connection with State Environmental Expenditures

<p class="1"><span lang="EN-GB">State environmental agencies serve as first-responders during and after environmental disasters (man-made or natural), track and identify individuals and businesses that violate anti-pollution statutes, and function as scientific and data-gathering centers for policy makers. The robustness of a state environmental agency’s budget also can be a measure of a state’s environmental commitment. An understanding of the funding dynamics associated with establishing a state’s environmental agency budget is a complex political ballet with often mysterious and competing forces influencing the financial choreography. </span></p><p class="1"><span lang="EN-GB">This paper analyzes possible political and cultural influences on budgetary outcomes in an attempt to identify those common, underlying, non-econometric factors that may drive or significantly contribute to state environmental agency funding. Those described here include, for 49 states (exclusive of Hawaii) between 2000 and 2009, total state expenditures, per capita income, educational attainment, agency staffing, environmental quality as measured through impaired waters, citizen ideology, and state agency performance. A Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient is used to compare state environmental expenditures to these seven data sets. </span></p><p class="1"><span lang="EN-GB">Those states showing the biggest change (positive or negative) in annual environmental agency budgets also have the strongest correlation (positive or negative) with the total number of independent variables. This relationship implies that changes to sociopolitical factors may sway or have an influence on state environmental agency funding. As the number of correlations increase, their effect on agency funding may become more pronounced. This suggests a “critical mass” type relationship. Alternatively, as more sociopolitical factors combine to compel either increases or decreases in environmental agency funding, legislative priorities might be re-organized to accommodate that pressure with funding levels adjusted accordingly. The confluence of these special interests, either positively or negatively, may force environmental agency funding levels to overcome or shed local suppressive or masking effects (political scandals, policy distractions, etc.) to more closely reflect constituent demands and concerns. </span></p>

Do Codes of Conduct and Ethical Leadership Influence Public Employees’ Attitudes and Behaviours? An experimental analysis

Corruption, political scandals, and the spreading adoption of management practices in the public sector contribute to a decline in public trust. Worldwide initiatives promoting good governance can be observed. At an organizational level, management of ethics has gained in importance as codes of conduct and ethical leadership are promoted. However, public management research has hardly analysed the impacts of these measures. To address this research gap, we conduct a between-subjects experiment among public administration employees. Our results reveal that only ethical leadership has a positive effect on employees’ organization-related attitudes. Our findings suggest avenues for further research.

Beyond the Wall: Mapping Twitter in China

In this paper, we map and analyze the structure and content found on Twitter centered around users in mainland China. This study offers a rare look at the activity of Chinese Internet users on a platform that is largely unregulated by the state and only reachable through the use of tools that circumvent state-mandated Internet filters. For Internet users that reside in mainland China, Twitter offers access to news from around the world and a wealth of ideas and perspectives that might otherwise be unavailable there, as well as a platform for building online communities that is not under direct control of the government. This study of Chinese Twitter — to our knowledge the first such study — offers a unique window into the online activities and global connections of Chinese Internet users who actively circumvent content restrictions. Based on a mixed-methods approach, combining social network analysis and a qualitative review of the content and activity of Chinese Twitter, we are able to map and provide detailed accounts of the topically based clusters that form among these networks. We identify 36 clusters that focus primarily on three areas: politics, technology, and entertainment. From one perspective, the discourse in the politically engaged portions of Chinese Twitter suggests that Twitter serves an alternative public sphere. The political group is formed of journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, and scholars, who are free to discuss topics typically not permitted in China, such as the Tiananmen Square protests, Tibetan and Uyghur issues, political scandals, and pollution. Yet China’s Internet repression is clearly succeeding. Chinese Twitter falls well short of supporting a broadly accessible networked public sphere. The proportion of the Chinese populace with direct access to the debates, communities, and shared resources on Twitter is relatively small, and the avenues by which such discourse might find its way into mainstream political discussion are severely constrained. The firewall between Twitter and the much larger social media platforms in China remains a formidable barrier.

Deny and Attack or Concede and Correct? Image Repair and the Politically Scandalized

In the wake of recent political scandals, pundits have argued that the way a politician reacts to a scandal can make or break said politician's relationship with constituents and future in elected office. Some politicians concede guilt immediately, apologize, promise to take corrective action, and possibly open the door to moving on with their careers. Others deny culpability and attack their accusers, hoping to quickly put accusations behind them, change the subject, and channel public attention in a different direction. Does conceding guilt after a scandal breaks and offering to take corrective action to solve the problem help ameliorate the issue, or does it push the public away even further? Does denying involvement in a scandal and attacking the accuser compound the problem, or can it evoke positive feelings? This research uses an experimental design to test individuals’ reactions to how politicians act after being accused of a personal scandal (in this case, an inappropriate relationship with a staffer). Results illustrate that a strategy involving denial and attacking accusers can spur positive evaluations of who a politician is and what that politician will do in the future, while the performance of conceding and taking corrective action is mixed at best.

A woman in a man’s world: La Banquière, money, transgression and the world of high finance

Money and finance, although central in our everyday life and crucial to the making of a film, are seldom the central topic of films. French cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s offers some significant mainstream films centring on the world of money and high finance, at a time when the value of money, since the severance of the gold-exchange standard in 1971, is no longer aligned to that of gold. This article focuses on La Banquière and the way money, finance and their representation inform the story and the film’s aesthetic choices. An historical drama inspired by the life of Marthe Hanau, a bisexual and pioneering Parisian banker of the 1920s, who became the source of one of the major financial and political scandals of the Third Republic, La Banquière features Romy Schneider in the lead role. A box-office success, the film is unique in showing a woman in a position of economic and political power. Just as in other films about the invisibility of large-scale transactions, money, when visible on screen, usually as banknotes or cheques, is bad money, the sign of a transgression of some kind, leading, paradoxically, to terrible consequences. This article offers an understanding of money represented on screen through the theoretical work of Jean-Joseph Goux.

Malaysia's political challenges

For many Malaysians, the most worrying aspect of recent political scandals and a fragmented opposition has been the evidence of a growing political polarisation along ethnic and religious lines.

The mediatization of public communication: looking through the discusses of political scandals

This article is on the Media process of public communication focused on a political scandal named mensalão. The corruption in the Brazilian policy is a recurrent issue in national media and even international. Under this perspective we propose to delineate some implications of the media upon debates of public communication issues. For these we are using Hjarvard studies (2012), Fausto Neto (2006, 2008) and Sodré (2002). On public communication we searched Weber (2009), Duarte (2007) and Brandão (2007). Having observed the site Rede de escândalos we can conclude that the media of issues of public interests is still at a preliminary phase, leaving these issues open to be discussed in a no longer future, hopefully.

The Value of Political Ties Versus Market Credibility: Evidence from Corporate Scandals in China

AbstractThis paper compares the value of political ties and market credibility in China by examining the consequence of corporate scandals. We categorize Chinese corporate scandals by whether the scandal is primarily associated with the destruction of (i) the firm's political networks (political scandals), (ii) the firm's market credibility (market scandals), or (iii) both (mixed scandals). Consistent with our hypothesis that scandals signaling the destruction of political ties are associated with greater losses in firm value than scandals signaling the destruction of market credibility, we find that the stock market reacts more negatively to political and mixed scandals than to market scandals. In addition, the greater negative market reactions associated with political and mixed scandals are primarily driven by firms that rely more on political networks. We also find that, compared to market scandals, political and mixed scandals lead to larger decreases in operating performance, greater reduction in loans from state‐owned banks, and higher departure of political directors.

Marginal Figures and the Ethos of the Global Novel

This essay approaches the global as an ethos emergent within contemporary fiction, taking J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) as its primary example. Recent accounts of global or world literature have generally considered these solely as spheres of circulation, while dominant accounts of the novel's ethics have been predicated upon its capacity to circulate otherness. Departing from these models, the essay revisits Erich Auerbach's claim that the contemporary novel would bear reference to “a common life.” And it considers alternative accounts of the ethics of culture in Lukács's and Heidegger's thought in order to propose that the potential for supranational circulation impinges upon the novel's mimesis: specifically, how figurations of character, action, and event relate to a larger social or communal horizon—the work's ethos. Attending to the problem of ethos in Disgrace clarifies the political scandal of its representation of postapartheid South Africa and draws out how the novel figures compelling ways of being and acting not limited to a South African horizon. Tracing this potential of figure in Disgrace's famous last scene, and through reference to Auerbach's early essay “Figura” (1938), the essay concludes by showing how fiction by Teju Cole and W. G. Sebald similarly respond to historical injustice by opening up an ethical horizon delimited by the work's trajectory rather than by given cultural and political formations. In this way, it argues for contemporary fiction's capacity to manifest an ethical notion of globality that does not simply reflect the workings of neoliberal globalization or other global processes.

Talking the Talk but Not Walking the Walk

Aggregate, survey, and experimental research into political scandal teaches us how the public reacts to revelations of misdeeds on behalf of its elected representatives. One common scenario, however, has been largely overlooked in scandal studies: the effects of hypocrisy in scandal. Examples abound of politicians who campaign on values that they then directly betray with their actions in office. Conventional wisdom, however, holds that such hypocrisy is an unpardonable transgression. We examine whether and how hypocrisy affects public reactions to political scandal and its perpetrators. Using a Quinnipiac University survey experiment, we demonstrate that negative judgments of a hypothetical politician caught in an adulterous relationship not only vary by degree depending on the presence or absence of hypocrisy but that they also vary by type of judgment. Individuals generally react more negatively to politicians in hypocritical scandal situations than nonhypocritical ones. In addition, a hypocritical situation affects public judgments of a politician’s competence in office, above and beyond other judgments, demonstrating an added professional aspect to judgments of scandals when they involve hypocrisy.

Sex, Power, and Cover-Ups: Defining Political Scandal as American Pop Culture

Nyhan (2015) has pointed to the lack of a good definition of political scandal, that many are too focused on evidence and not on the larger picture of context. He attempts to bring together some prior definitions to fit a study of the effects of media coverage on scandal. What is still missing, however, is a definition of scandal that applies more broadly to its inclusion in what Thompson (2008) calls ―the larger audience‖ beyond more traditional media coverage. How do we account for why some scandals capture the imagination of that larger audience better than others? Further, what makes some scandals a better fit for more contemporary, non-traditional forms of media? This paper is a first step at trying to find that definition and how it leads to the pop culturization of scandal.