In the United States and elsewhere, scandals involving politicians or other public figures are common. Such scandals often stem from corruption, whereby private interest or lust for power warps government policies in ways that harm voters. When this occurs, public programs such as education, health, infrastructure, and social safety-net programs suffer from the misallocation of resources. Corrupt politicians also deprive their communities of vital services, such as adequate housing and safe workplaces. The United States has seen such corruption and its consequences many times throughout its history.
Political scandals typically entail a variety of issues and can involve politicians from the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of government. They can also involve a variety of motives and behaviors such as greed, lust, mendacity, obsession, naivete, moral bankruptcy, or lapses in good judgment. Almost all scandals, however, share a few key elements.
One of the most important is that they are partisan in nature. Politicians who violate behavioral norms in a partisan way have a harder time getting back into the good graces of their constituents. This is because the partisanship of the accusations against them suggests that their parties are more interested in protecting their narrow ideological interests than in weeding out bad behavior from their ranks.
The lessons that have been drawn from research on political scandal are clear. Politicians can only be punished if their private misbehavior is exposed, and this requires that real or conjectured norm transgressions be publicly reported and framed in a manner that threatens to tarnish a politician’s image or standing in the eyes of voters.
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