Political Sex Scandals Research Articles

In the public interest? Political sex scandals and the media in Ireland

ABSTRACT As with the United States and Great Britain there has been a markedincrease in the prevalence of political sex scandal themed stories reported on by Irish media since the 1990s. This article considers the concept of the political sex scandal, and its relationship with media in the Irish case. It argues that political sex scandal was a frequent part of Irish journalism pre-independence but that, post-independence, this approach was replaced with a reticence to report such scandal until the 1990s. It finds that,today, Irish media avoid reporting on the private lives of politicians and instead focus on incidents wherein politicians intervene in sex-related court cases, when politicians are caught acting inappropriately on camera and on when politicians engage in matters sexual on social media. Thus, unlike the US and Britain, the key structural characteristic of contemporary Irish political sex scandals is not media intrusion into the private lives of politicians but rather media oversight of when and how politicians engage in sex-related issues in public fora such as the judicial system and social media.

Sex scandals, reputational management, and masculinity under neoliberal conditions

This article presents political sex scandals as a critical site for understanding contemporary formations of masculinity under conditions of neoliberalism. While media coverage of sex scandals typically revolves around a spectacularized failure of a particular man to live up to an idealized image of masculinity, we contend that sex scandals represent momentary ruptures that lay bare historically specific contradictions of neoliberal masculine subjectivities. These inconsistencies reiterate abiding contradictions in dominant constructions of modern masculinity even as they assume unprecedented forms in today’s technoculture. To make this case, we examine several modern political sex scandals, including those involving Elliot Spitzer, Bob Filner, and Anthony Weiner.

The Len Brown Affair: The roles of new and old media in a New Zealand political sex scandal

The power of online media to influence New Zealand local government politics was made clear in 2013 when a blogger revealed that Len Brown, the popular mayor of Auckland, had conducted a two-year, extramarital affair. The mainstream media picked up the story, Brown’s popularity collapsed and in late 2015 he announced he would not stand again for mayor. This media scandal was, in part, driven by the fact that Brown was a celebrity. Unlike several high-profile sex scandals involving politicians overseas, Brown’s career did not survive the controversy, perhaps because the public came to regard him as a practised liar. The media itself engaged in self-serving scandalous activity during the controversy. Today’s shock bloggers are similar to the proto-journalists of the 17th century. Members of new and old media researching the scandal treated their secret sources very differently. The existence of the internet means such scandals can now exist in perpetuity. If the Len Brown Affair was an example of the media fulfilling its watchdog role - by exposing a lying politician - it was also an example of journalists furthering their own ends - political and commercial - by appealing to their audiences’ purient interests.

Honor in the face of shame: the semiotics of the American flag at political-sex-scandal press conferences

Political sex scandals occurred in rapid succession from 2004 to 2011 in the U.S. The press conferences that followed received significant interest from the national press and public. Interestingly, a general pattern occurred where politicians who resigned at the press conference displayed an American flag and wore a lapel pin, while those who remained in office did not. After conducting a semiotic analysis of eight popular-press images, we argue that the absence of the American flag indicates a separation of personal scandal from the office, and the presence of the flag indicates that personal transgression has public consequences as embodied by the politician’s resignation. Furthermore, the politician’s desire for control over his public representation may inversely impact his concern for social presence and media richness in the U.S. Removal of the visual presence (lower media richness) will also have an impact on the visual literacy or the holistic nature of the event’s visual language. After all, an audience’s understanding of that event is largely accomplished through available visuals, such as the American flag.

Gender in Political Sex Scandals in Contemporary Turkey: Women’s Agency and the Public Sphere

Sex scandals in politics lead to intense public debates about fundamental issues, such as morality, publicity, and privacy, rendering gender inequalities more visible than ever. This article aims to reveal the complex gendered dynamics of the political culture by looking at sex scandals in contemporary Turkey. The ways in which these scandals have been narrated, negotiated, and resolved among the public and political actors provide grounds for analysis about the nature of patriarchal dynamics regarding women’s agency and public credibility communicated through their sexuality in contemporary Turkey.

When women attack.

The common assumption that female candidates on the campaign trail should not go on the attack, because such tactics contradict gender stereotypes, has not received consistent support. We argue that in some circumstances gender stereotypes will favor female politicians going negative. To test this proposition, this study examines how gender cues affect voter reactions to negative ads in the context of a political sex scandal, a context that should prime gender stereotypes that favor females. Using an online experiment involving a national sample of U.S. adults (N = 599), we manipulate the gender and partisan affiliation of a politician who attacks a male opponent caught in a sex scandal involving sexually suggestive texting to a female intern. Results show that in the context of a sex scandal, a female candidate going on the attack is evaluated more positively than a male. Moreover, while female participants viewed the female sponsor more favorably, sponsor gender had no effect on male participants. Partisanship also influenced candidate evaluations: the Democratic female candidate was evaluated more favorably than her Republican female counterpart.

Faces of Political Sex Scandal: Investigating Pathways to Penance, Remedy and Resolution through Iconic Scandal

Public fascination with scandal is often seen as a distraction. Yet when the public pays attention, it embarks on a moral discourse about society's values and norms. In order to examine the unique rhetorical functions of scandal's iconic images, we consider the image of Silda Spitzer standing with her then-husband Eliot at the 2008 press conference where he stepped down as New York governor, as well as the remix, “How to tell if your dog is involved in a sex scandal.” Not all images of scandal reach iconic status, but when they do it is because of the rhetorical functions they serve—negotiating incongruities, bringing to light societal issues not readily evident, and providing pathways to penance, remedy, and resolution.

How Leaders Recover (or Not) from Publicized Sex Scandals

The leader integrity literature has described how professional behavior influences perceptions of integrity, yet behavior in leaders’ personal lives potentially affects those perceptions. The present paper examined how personal life behavior affects leaders. We assessed high profile political sex scandals to explore the research questions of how indiscretions in personal life affect leaders and how leaders recover from public revelations of sexual indiscretions. The results revealed that whether politicians survived the scandal depended on (a) the degree to which the indiscretion deviated from accepted norms, (b) the degree to which the behavior departed from the politician’s expressed values, (c) the leader’s political power (or value), and (d) whether the leader fully engaged in atonement under conditions when denying the allegations is not possible. These components were inter-related such that atonement was possible if the behavior was neither too extreme nor out of character and the leader had sufficient political power. The model was then tested with a sample of business executives engaged in sex scandals, finding support for its elements.

The Composition Classroom and the Political Sex Scandal

This article details a newspaper-based composition exercise focused on examining coverage of a trio of local political sex scandals. The exercise encouraged first-year composition students to analyze how the rhetorical strategies that the New York Post used in covering these three similar scandals—which involved former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, then-current New York governor David Paterson, and former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey—differed markedly depending on the Post’s then-relationship to each political figure. In the exercise, students chose several articles at random from a selection of newspaper clippings about these scandals and wrote any interesting headlines, epithets, or descriptions of cartoons they had found on the section of the board dedicated to each governor; students then used the evidence gathered in each section to generate and support thesis statements about the Post’s differing coverage of the three governors’ scandals. This examination through close reading of the Post’s rhetorical strategies in covering parallel sex scandals inspired thoughtful discourse among my composition students, including an increased appreciation of and interest in the news media, an improved understanding of the strategies that scholars use when they gather and interpret textual evidence, and intelligent discussions about the implications of rhetorical strategies utilizing Otherness.

Political sex scandal as an outgrowth of television culture: Moving the phenomenon beyond its sensational roots

Abstract Media outlets enthusiastically cover news of political sex scandals in the United States when a politician is caught breaking sexual norms. While the content of scandals, by definition, is sensational and highly titillating, it is important not to view these events merely as filler, soft news. Rather, this article argues that while scandal is an outgrowth of television culture, indicative of the premium society places on its scintillating content, analysis of mediated scandals can also reveal fundamental elements of our social fabric that make the subject necessary for analysis.

Exposing Politicians’ Peccadilloes in Comparative Context: Explaining the Frequency of Political Sex Scandals in Eight Democracies Using Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Political sex scandals are largely absent in some democracies but proliferate in others. However, there have so far been few if any comprehensive attempts to document the actual number of sex scandals that have occurred and to explain their presence (and, indeed, absence), and the one study that has (Barker's 1994 study) ended in the early 1990s and had numerous problems in relation to defining and documenting such scandals. Based on extensive research, this article documents the number of sex scandals in eight advanced industrial democracies and tries to explain their occurrence using Charles Ragin's fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The article has three goals: to determine the number of sex scandals in different democracies, explain why this might be, and demonstrate the utility of fuzzy set qualitative case analysis for small- and medium-N comparative research.

The Value of Outside Support for Male and Female Politicians Involved in a Political Sex Scandal

ABSTRACT This research examined how third party statements impact the evaluation of male and female politicians caught in a scandal (i.e., extramarital affair). Governor's sex was crossed with three types of support statements: third party supportive (TPS), third party non-supportive (TPNS), and governor self-supportive (GSS). In Experiment 1, a female politician was evaluated more positively than a male politician. The TPS and the GSS conditions were both evaluated more positively than the TPNS condition. Experiment 2's design was similar to Experiment 1's, except it involved multiple affairs. In Experiment 2, participants used the third party's statements as an information source and thus reduced their use of gender stereotypes in the TPS and TPNS conditions compared to the GSS condition. We also found that male respondents gave more negative evaluations of the female governor than female respondents. Implications for the gender stereotype and social influence literatures are discussed.

Not so sexy: public opinion of political sex scandals as reflected in political cartoons

An analysis of political cartoons of three well‐known US political sex scandals is presented to examine how cartoons channel public perception in terms of the involvement of a prominent politician and the difference of opinion based on who the politician is, frame the organization of communal knowledge, and facilitate the grounds upon which some things can be said.On one side of the spectrum, theories of political cartoons presume that political cartoons reflect public attitudes about current events and that by studying cartoons surrounding a sex scandal, public attitudes toward such a scandal can be effectively understood. On the other side of the spectrum, theory argues that cartoons actually persuade and shape public attitudes, intentions, and behaviors.Three prominent former US politicians were selected for the analysis: Eliot Spitzer and the Emperor's Club Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky John Edwards and Rielle HunterThe criteria of narrative, location, binary struggle, and normative transfer were used as a framework to analyze 230 cartoons. The findings suggest that some politicians emerge relatively unscathed from scandals, others are seriously condemned, yet others are obscured or have their roles changed substantially. On the basis of the research criteria, it seems that public reactions and sentiments toward politicians' involvement in a scandal depend on what the scandal was about, where it occurred and what happened there, who the protagonists in the conflict were, and who the loser in the story was. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas

The recent struggle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas and the credibility of Anita Hill raises in a dramatic and pointed way many of the issues at stake in theorizing the public sphere in contemporary society. At one level, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Hill's claim that Thomas sexually harassed her constituted an exercise in democratic publicity as it has been understood in the classical liberal theory of the public sphere. The hearings opened to public scrutiny a function of government, namely, the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. They thus subjected a decision of state officials to the force of public opinion. Through the hearings, in fact, public opinion was constituted and brought to bear directly on the decision itself, affecting the process by which the decision was made as well as its substantive outcome. As a result, state officials were held accountable to the public by means of a discursive process of opinion and will formation. Yet that classical liberal view of the public sphere does not tell the