The Determinants and Outcomes of Political Scandal in Post-Watergate America

Home , Alan Mollohan, Albert Bustamante, Alcee Hastings, Antonio Villaraigosa, Arlan Stangeland, Austin Murphy

Politicians Behaving Badly: The Determinants and Outcomes of Political Scandal in Post-Watergate America

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

By Sarah McKinnon Bryner, M.A. Graduate Program in Political Science

The Ohio State University 2014

Dissertation Committee: Kathleen McGraw, Advisor Thomas Nelson Nathaniel Swigger

Abstract

Scandals occur frequently in American politics. In this dissertation, I attempt to explore the concept of scandal in the post-Watergate era, by both creating a large database of political scandals and by exploring individual reactions to constructed scandals. I find that scandals tend to occur in bodies where politicians have greater access to power, that incumbency generally tends to protect politicians from electoral defeat, and that shared partisanship between individuals and the politicians involved in scandal protects the politician, but that this relationship is mediated by the role of emotions.

Throughout, I discuss the potential role the media may play in the creation and mediation of scandal.

Dedication

For Austin

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Acknowledgements

I would first like to acknowledge the tirelessness of the political science graduate student community at the Ohio State University. You are my comrades in arms. I entered with one of the largest cohorts in the history of our program, and am continually honored to count myself as one of that cohort’s members.

The world-class Ohio State faculty, particularly Kathleen McGraw, Tom Nelson, and Nathanial Swigger are really the reason this document exists. Kathleen helped me take what felt like a jumble of thoughts and form them into a serviceable document, and

Tom asked critical questions and has always encouraged me to think outside of the box.

Together, they got me through this in spite of the challenges of working on a dissertation while also working full-time. Nathaniel Swigger also provided critical feedback and ultimately shaped the direction the document took.

Jeff Budziak was an ever present, always energetic, supporter of my work. Were it not for his insight, sometimes offered through Gmail’s chat tool, I would have been a far lonelier person. Emily Lynch was, and remains, a partner in this process, and I am happy for her calm presence and generous services as a sounding board. Chryl Laird, with whom I spent many an evening reviewing conditional logistic regression, was a terrific ally. Jason Keiber, Bentley Allen, Steve Nawara, Chris Devine, Kyle Kopko, Erin

Graham, Dane Immerman, Nyron Crawford, Amanda Yates, Kathleen Winters, Allyson

Shortle, Dana Wittmer, Justin Acome, Malkah Bird, Broxton Bird, and Lindsay

Bernhagan: you are my peers, and my friends, and for that I am proud.

Thank you to Georgia Duerst-Lahti and Amy Sarno for encouraging me to attend graduate school and making sure I had the tools to get there.

I am forever indebted to the entire staff of the Center for Responsive Politics, particularly Sheila Krumholz. Sheila provided me with critical flexibility so that I was able to complete a dissertation while also working for a national nonprofit. She also took a risk, and in doing so changed my life, by promoting a 28-year-old dissertation student to a position of occasionally terrifying authority. Every day, I try to make sure she does not regret that decision. Bob Biersack, scholar extraordinaire, also helped the development of this project. I would also like to thank Team 2012 (Robert Maguire,

Doug Weber, Dan Auble, Mark Mullaney, and Carolyn Chambers) whose unflinching support helped me survive the 2012 presidential election. More recently, I can attribute a lightness in my footsteps to the current research department at the Center. Thank you for making me happy to come to work.

Nicole Mauri provided invaluable research assistance and also kept me sane as I finished the last bits of data collection.

I kept my wonderful family, including Mary McKinnon, Scott Bryner, Andrew

Bryner, Mike McKinnon, John McKinnon and Maggie McKinnon, at arm’s length throughout my dissertation process. However, there is little doubt about whether I would even be in a PhD program were it not for my parents. From the moment they elected to enroll me in an open optional education program, to the time they let me move away

v from home at the age of 17 so that I could work in the Alaska legislature, to their support in the form of airplane tickets and phone calls – I am incredibly lucky to have such a support network.

And finally, there is no question that Austin Carson was one of the most critical people involved in this dissertation. He remains my strongest tether to the academic universe, inspiring me to work when it is easier to sleep, to think when it is easier just to type, and to talk things over when it is easier to ruminate. He also refused to let me quit, and attending his graduation was an inspiring event that ultimately lead to the fulfillment of this long, long project. Austin leads by example, and in doing so helps me be a better person. And, on a lighter note, he also simultaneously keeps me grounded, helps me believe in myself, and makes me laugh.

Vita

May 2002...... Steller Secondary School, Anchorage AK

2006...... B.A. Political Science, Beloit College

2008...... M.A. Political Science, Ohio State University

2008-2011……...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of

Political Science, Ohio State University

2011-2012…..…………………...... Lobbying Researcher, Center for Responsive

Politics, Washington D.C.

2012 to present…………………………....Research Director, Center for Responsive

Politics, Washington D.C.

Publications Kopko, Kyle C., Bryner, Sarah McKinnon., Budziak, Jeffrey L., Devine, Christopher J., Nawara, Steven P. 2011. “In the eye of the beholder: Motivated reasoning in disputed elections.” Political Behavior 33(2): 271

Nelson, Thomas E., Bryner, Sarah McKinnon, Carnahan, Dustin. 2011. “Media and Politics.” In J.N.Druckman, J.Kuklinski, D.P. Green, and A. Lupia. (Eds.). Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science. Cambridge University Press: 202-213.

Field of Study

Major Field: Political Science

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Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………… ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………… iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………….. iv Vita………………………………………………………………………………… vii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………. viii List of Tables……………………………………………………………………… x List of Figures…………………………………………………………………….. xii Chapter 1: Conceptualizing Scandal……………………………………………… 1 Scandal versus Corruption………………………………………… 3 Phases of Scandal…………………………………………………. 17 Chapter 2: Origins of Scandal…………………………………………………….. 29 Phases One and Two: Situational vs. Individualist Factor……...... 30 Exploring Phase Three: The media intervention………………….. 42 Hypotheses………………………………………………………… 44 The Data………………………………………………………….. 48 Descriptive Data…………………………………………………… 52 Estimation………………………………………………………… 60 Discussion…………………………………………………………. 71 Chapter 3: Survival of Scandal……………………………………………………. 76 Literature Review…………………………………………………. 79 Hypotheses………………………………………………………… 84

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Data……………………………………………………………….. 86 Results…………………………………………………………….. 88 Estimation………………………………………………………… 90 Discussion…………………………………………………………. 97 Chapter 4: Scandals and Morality…………………………………………………. 101 Hypotheses………………………………………………………… 114 Experimental Design………………………………………………. 116 Descriptive Data…………………………………………………… 121 Estimation…………………………………………………………. 129 Discussion…………………………………………………………. 142 Chapter 5: Conclusions…………………………………………………………… 145 Appendix A: Sources……………………………………………………………… 142 Appendix B: Coded Variables…………………………………………………….. 160 Appendix C: List of Scandals……………………………………………………... 164 Appendix D: Devices……………………………………………………………… 159 Appendix E: Experimental Questions…………………………………………….. 187 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………….. 197

List of Tables

Table 1:1 Definitions of Scandal………..………..………..………..…………….. 13 Table 1:2 Scandal vs. Corruption………..………..………..………..…………….. 16

Table 2:1 Number of scandal events, by office………..………..………..………... 54

Table 2:2 Number of scandal events, by State………..………..………..…...... 56

Table 2:3 Number of scandal events, by party and office………..………..………. 57

Table 2:4: Count of Scandal by Gender ………..………..………..………………. 58

Table 2:5: Scandals by Type and Party………..………..………..…………………59

Table 2:6: Number of state-level scandals per state………..………..…………….. 62

Table 2:7 Count of Scandals, Election and Non-Election Years………………….. 63

Table 2:8 Number of Scandals, by party, comp to US Cong membership………... 66

Table 2:9 Rare Events Logistic Regression results for invlmt in Scandal………... 67

Table 2:10 Poisson Count model of determ. of the # of scandals, per year………..70

Table 3:1 Counts of Scandal Outcomes ………..………..………..………………. 87

Table 3:2 Logistic Regression of Survival………..………..………..…………….. 94

Table 3:3 Logistic Regression Models predicting scandal survival……………… 96

Table 4:1 Participant Scores on MFT scale………..………..………..…………… 122

Table 4:2 Correlations between Moral Foundations………..………..…………….. 123

Table 4:3 Reliability of Moral Foundations Scales………..………..……………... 124

Table 4:4 Emotion activation by treatment condition, means………..……………. 126

Table 4:5 Correlation between emotions and resulting factor variable……...... 127

Table 4:6 Correlations between Traits and resulting factors………………………. 128

Table 4:7: Zero-order correl between moral foundations and outcomes………….. 130

Table 4:8 Two-Model comparison of 2x2 ANOVA results, F-Tests……………… 135

Table 4:9 ANOVA tests for attitudinal, emotional, and trait measures……………. 136

Table 4:10 Feeling Thermometer, Two-Stage Least Squares Models……………. 141

Table A:1 Newspapers………..………..………..………..………..……………… 159

List of Figures

Figure 1:1: Scandal vs. Corruption………..………..…………..………..………… 15

Figure 2:1 Count of Scandals, all Officeholders………..………..……………….. 53

Figure 2:2 Count of Scandals, Congress only………..………..………………….. 53

Figure 3:1 Survival Percent by Time in Office………..………..…………………. 89

Figure 3:2 Survival Percent for Reelection campaigns, by Seniority……………… 90

Figure 4:1 Moral Foundations and Political Ideology………..………..…………... 110

Figure 4:2 Means of Moral Foundation Scores by PID…………………………….123

Figure 4:3 Feeling thermometer by condition, Purity Assessment………………… 132

Figure 4:4 Feeling thermometer by condition, Purity Assessment………………… 132

Figure 4:5 Means on Fe therm by Treatment Grp and Shared Part……………….. 137

Figure 4:6 Means on Fe therm by Treatment Grp by Party Condition……………. 138

Figure D:1 Sample Device Treatment………..………..…………..………………. 179

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CHAPTER 1: CONCEPTUALIZING SCANDAL

Scandals are a curious phenomenon in American political science. They are, at the same time, both ever-present in American history, and relatively neglected by scholars. Much like thunderstorms on election days, they are seen as exogenous shocks to the political system and inserted into models as control variables (Bauer and Hibbing

1989). Their presence may lead to government reforms (MacKenzie and Hafken 2002), but in other circumstances, scandals can decrease levels of trust in political systems and structures (Chanley, Rudolph and Rahn 2000, Weeber 2009). At the Presidential level, being involved in scandal can result in the disintegration of Presidential relationships with Congress, decreasing effectiveness (Mienke and Anderson 2001). In essence, scandals can be far more than isolated, one-off events. Watergate fundamentally changed the ways Americans viewed the presidency, and the Lewinsky scandal contributed to a new relationship between the President and the media. But, the presence of scandal is often seen as a given – wherever there is politics, scandal often follows.

Scandals make a compelling area for academic research because of their frequency and their relationships to political trust. In an era where Congressional approval hovers around 10%, and where the 113th Congress has pushed fewer pieces of legislation than any Congress in recent memory, an increasingly hostile relationship between citizens and members of Congress may have deleterious effects on policy. The frequency of politicians moving from public office to pubic incarceration do nothing to

1 provide citizens with any reason to trust their public office holders. Truly, the presence of scandal as a now-common feature in American politics makes it all the more important to understand why scandals come into being, and whether there is anything the American public can do to reduce corruption in politics.

Scandals can also inform scholarly work about candidate evaluation. As study after study show, partisanship and incumbency matter. But, can some scandals damage a politician's reputation so thoroughly that his co-partisans might forsake him in spite of years of having voted for him previously. But, in other cases, shared partisanship could protect politicians who might otherwise be eviscerated by constituents. These dynamics are complex. Scandals usually are seen as negative events, and one could plausibly argue that being involved in one would hurt the politician's reputation. However, it is certainly possible that some scandals are seen as worse than others, and that variations in their perception vary depending on the perceivers preconceptions about right and wrong. The way individuals interpret negative information may not just be limited to the world of scandal, and so I hope that scandals can serve as a test of whether moral reasoning influences the evaluation of political actors.

In this dissertation, I will explore the concept of scandal in detail. I will discuss the ways in which scandal and corruption differ and I will offer a precise definition of the term “scandal” which will be both specific enough to be conceptually clear and broad enough to include a large variety of events. Relying on this definition, I will compile the only complete database of all political scandals in the post-Watergate era. Using this dataset, I then show that the likelihood of becoming involved in a scandal is not constant

2 for all politicians across all time periods and that predictable characteristics can lead some politicians to be more “scandal-prone” than others, and I will discuss the ways in which survival likelihood varies as a function of both a politician’s predispositions and the political climate. In the tradition of political psychology, I will also examine the role that diverse individual attitudes play in shaping individual evaluations of politicians. For the same reasons that the term scandal can be difficult to precisely define, individuals do not necessarily view the same behaviors as scandalous, and the consequences of a politician’s misdeeds can take a variety of shapes based on some of these differences in individual attitudes.

Scandal versus Corruption

Scandal and corruption are conceptually related and so closely so that defining the difference between the two concepts should precede defining scandal itself. Not all scandals involve corruption, and not all cases of corruption can be called scandals, even within a single-country context. Corruption, broadly defined, is the misappropriation of public goods for private gain (Moodie 1989, Klitgaard 1998). Examples of corruption could include a politician requiring a lobbyist to provide a gift in exchange for a specific vote, a state political party manipulating vote outcomes, or an elected official promising high-profile positions to family friends. All three examples above could also potentially become scandals, if the behaviors are considered to transgress popular understandings of the proper behavior of politicians and also become public. In some regions of the world

(and, indeed, in some places in the United States not too long ago), behaviors considered

3 corrupt by most Americans would not qualify as such because they have been normalized in that region.

Scholars have struggled with how to define boundaries around the concept of corruption for decades, predominantly because individuals can disagree about what is corrupt. Corruption to one person might be considered “just politics” to another (Peters and Welch 1978). The legal scholar Lawrence Lessig has also discussed the boundaries of corruption, but chooses to draw them wider than most – to Lessig, corruption is endemic to an American system that forces politicians to raise money as a precursor to their action (Lessig 2004). To Lessig, what many Americans consider to be a normal part of politics is systematically corrupt. The concept of “systemic corruption” is not a new one – Scoble (1973) also recognized the pattern of some behaviors, tolerated by elites but seen as generally unacceptable by the general public.

Lessig’s definition implies that if a politician accepted a campaign donation, for example, he would be participating in a corrupt system. However, it is also clear that very few individuals would call the acceptance of a legal campaign contribution a

“scandal,” even if they view the system in which that donation was made to itself be corrupt. The public evaluation component of corruption, while clearly not a major consideration in Lessig’s definition, has been used as a necessary component in other definitions of corruption. Heidenheimer (1970) argued that corruption can come in

“shades,” depending on the reaction from political elites and the mass public. Systemic corruption, which the mass public might find unacceptable but political elites do not, falls in to Heidenheimer’s “gray” area.

Heidenheimer’s three-category typography forms the basis for Peters and Welch’s

(1978) early typography of corruption, which posits that scandals vary in their magnitude, as defined by the public. In Peters and Welch’s work, they examined different types of corruption and the number of individuals who viewed those behaviors as corrupt. To reach the “level” of corruption, which they argue does need a certain amount of public by-in, behaviors need to exploit large numbers of people and result in private gain. The worst sort of corruption would be one where a politician hurt many people over a long period in time at the bequest of a non-constituent. Small actions hurting only a small number of people and benefiting a person close to the politician (or a constituent) are seen as “less” corrupt. These discussions are more of a difference of degree than one of kind, but do highlight that when doing research on corruption and scandal, there may be questions of magnitude.

The existence of Heidenhamer’s gray area is the first critical distinction between corruption and scandal. Corruption, however broadly or strictly it may be defined, is not a sufficient precondition for scandal. The public and elites do need to collectively decide that the corrupt action is a scandal, and not “just politics.” The public and elites do not need to agree on the appropriate “punishment” for the individual involved in the scandal, but they do need to collectively recognize that the behavior transgresses the bounds of acceptable public behavior.

The second major difference between scandal and corruption lies in the distinction between the kinds of behaviors classified in each. Some sort of “payoff” is required for corruption (Peters and Welch 1978, Scoble 1973, Moodie 1989), and most

5 scholars agree that a component of corruption involves misusing one’s political office to receive that payoff. This clearly is not a necessary component for scandal. Certainly, one of the major facets of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal involved what some would consider to be a “misuse” of office, but many sex scandals involve parties who are unaware of the politician’s office (Larry Craig is a good example). Similarly, although one might be able to argue that Kwame Kirkpatrick had “easier” access to cocaine than a nonpolitician, this also seems to be a reach, but his (and other politicians’ drug use) was labeled as a scandal by major news outlets.

For the purposes of this dissertation, I rely on the traditional definition, which is that corruption is the misappropriation of public goods for private gain. Having established this, I now move to scandal. One of the most critical differences between corruption and scandal is the role of the audience in a scandal. A scandal, unlike corruption, needs to be publicized. Every scholar who has researched scandal includes an important place in their definition for the process by which the scandal becomes public knowledge, which is nearly always through the media. Nyhan (2013) goes so far as to call a scandal a “coproduction” between the media and the opposition party. However, media coverage is not a sufficient condition for scandal. Much of the scholarly work defining scandal focuses on whether norm violation is necessary for the creation of scandal. In other words, what “events” can become scandals? Even if the creation of a scandal also involves publicity and public reaction, the details of the scandal event itself do have significant impact on how the “scandal moment” unfolds.

One of the most common components of the definition of scandal is the concept of norm violation. Apostolidis and Williams (2004) define a scandal as the “publicization of a transgression of a social norm (3),” and also claim that the result of a scandal is

“public disgrace.” These three components – publicization, transgression, and resulting disgrace are common throughout several other definitions of scandal.

Ari Adut’s On Scandal defines a scandal as a publicized transgression with three major components: a transgression, someone willing to publicize the transgression, and a public willing to receive information about the transgression. His definition, while simple, does indeed capture most scandals in recent history. The ambiguity surrounding the word transgression can pose challenges for conceptual clarity. Many types of action could be considered to be transgressions, and to different individuals. Two of Adut’s three components involve the reaction of other individuals, which allows for some ambiguity in the definition, because a transgression that doesn’t also have a willing public audience is likely a weaker one and probably would not deserve to be called a scandal.

What Adut does not mention is that audiences can vary widely in their interpretation of transgressions, so just receiving information may not necessarily imply scandal. Consider, for example, a Mormon politician who violates one of the norms of his church community by drinking alcohol. This behavior transgresses the norms for his community, and if his political opponent (or a reporter) chooses to try to make this public, his constituents might be more than willing to learn of this transgression.

However, if his constituents are not also Mormon, they might only view the action as one

7 of mild hypocrisy – or if they are Mormon, they could view it as a mistake that does not deserve meaningful retribution. This example suggests that a negative reaction by the audience, even if this is only temporary, is necessary for an event to become a scandal.

In 2013, when Cory Booker (an unmarried candidate for the US Senate at the time) was found to have been engaging in “tweets” with a stripper and the story was broken by the

New York Times, it received very little media attention – and the attention it did garner was often questioning whether or not his exchanges would be called a “scandal.”1

Another scholar of scandals, John Thompson, argues that scandals are composed of a moral transgression, secretive intent, a public which denounces the event, and the damaging of the politician’s reputation (2000). Adut and Thompson’s definition of scandal both involve a transgression and a public audience which disapproves of the transgression. Scandal “presupposes some degree of public disapproval,” but Thompson also argues that the politician’s reputation is very likely to be damaged by the transgression (2000, 19). Even though the damage to reputation is not a necessary consequence of scandal, it is a risk, according to Thompson. It is this risk of damage to reputation that encourages individuals to keep their behavior covert, which is also a necessary component of Thompson’s definition.

Thompson describes scandals as a sequence of events – beginning with the transgression to the publicity around it to the negative evaluation by uninvolved parties.

This is a similar approach to that taken by Moodie (1988). Moodie defines scandal as more than just “mere wrongdoing” (216), but rather as a sequence of events involving an

1 http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-cory-booker-stripper- 20130926,0,7141278.story

“exposer, channels through which to communicate the message and an audience or public which finds the information to be scandalous (216).” For Moodie, who is exploring scandal through a comparative lens, a free and independent media is a critical component for the production of scandal. As the significance of the mainstream media as the sole provider of information begins to wane, so too might the importance of it in the construction of scandal. The Lewinsky scandal largely broke through tabloid journalism, and although the events of the Arab Spring extend outside of the boundaries of scandal, social media tools like Twitter and Facebook served as alternative news sources as well as mobilizing tools. Regardless of the particular media tools used, Thompson’s definition does not require an interested and involved media.

More recently, Nyhan rejects the traditional assumption that norm violation is necessary to something being considered to be a scandal (Nyhan 2013) and fully embraces the need for media involvement. He argues that “media recognition of a controversy they are covering as a scandal is the best contemporaneous indicator of whether a political figure or government official is widely believed by elites to have acted in a manner that contravenes established moral, political, or procedural norms”

(Nyhan 3-4). To Nyhan, media play a critical role in the construction of scandal, which does not need to be based on actual fact nor does it need to elicit public uproar. The recent assassination of the US’s ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, resulted in uproar from the conservative wing of the Republican Party, but was never called a “scandal” by the mainstream press. Nyhan also describes Whitewater as an event which was deemed to be a scandal by the mainstream press, but received little uproar among the people.

Nyhan describes scandal as being a “…’co-production’ of the press and the opposition party” (Nyhan 2013, 4). Incentives, particularly in the post-Watergate era, exist for the reporter who “breaks” a scandal, and as such, the media are often voracious in their pursuit of potentially scandalous information. At the same time, the opposition party may be able to capitalize on the negative news attention and hurt the credibility of their opponent. These two incentive structures provide these actors with the motive to both uncover scandalous activity, as well as to label such activity as a “scandal.”

Nyhan’s definition differs from others in that it is much less focused on the lifecycle of a scandal or its components (Thompson, conversely, considers lifecycle to be an important characteristic of many scandals), but rather on their construction.

My own definition of scandal incorporates many of the different components from other scholars, but allows for more ambiguity in certain stages. Unlike Nyhan, I do believe that norm violation is necessary for scandal to occur. This does not need to be a norm violation to all, but at least to a connected population (e.g. the politician’s constituents or the general American population or the politician’s co-politicians). I do not necessarily think that this norm violation needs to involve moral violations; simply behaving illegally (speeding, using certain recreational drugs, excessive drinking) may violate the norms for elite behavior but not raise eyebrows among the voting public.

The second necessary component for scandal, in my definition, is public knowledge of the scandal. This does not need to originate with the mainstream media, nor does the media need to identify the behavior as a scandal immediately. The person who makes the behavior public might be an opposition candidate, but as long as the

10 media actively publicizes the behavior, scandal can occur. Note that this does rely on there being a norm violation to publicize. Merely publicizing “politics as usual” (or, an opposition candidate accusing the politician of wrong doing) does not necessarily create scandal, as the norms for behavior during campaigns may be different than those during a term of office.

I do not believe that secrecy is a necessary component of scandal, although I do believe it is common. I think that a politician initiating a cover-up could be an indicator of malfeasance, but covertness is not necessarily a precursor to scandal. When politicians utter overtly racist or sexist comments (e.g. Todd Akin’s comments about rape during the

2012 elections), there is no element of secrecy and massive scandals can erupt. In these cases, which are not uncommon, there is a “reveal,” but it is not of covert, secretive behavior but rather of previously unshared politically incorrect views or attitudes. In many cases secrecy is a characteristic of scandal and doing something in public may be an indication that there is no scandal.

I also do not believe that the opposition party is necessary to the process of scandal. A politician can become involved in a sex scandal, for example, without any interaction with the opposition party. The opposition party may – and often does – call for the politician to leave office, but even in one-party states or regions, I think that scandal can occur. Anthony Weiner’s (first) sex scandal, involving leaked text messages, may have elicited cries of outrage from New York’s Republicans, but the opposition party was reactive, not proactive.

And, finally, I try to distinguish between the citizenry’s response to scandal and the overall effect on the politician’s reputation. I argue that although it is necessary for at least some of the public to have a negative assessment of the behavior, it is not necessary for the politician’s reputation to be damaged. Clinton is an archetype for the politician who emerges from scandal even more popular than when he began it, but assessments of his character were negatively affected. As Zaller argued, the Clinton example is one that questions whether character assessments are critical to overall summary evaluations of politicians (Zaller 1998). Although the two may be closely linked, the mere fact that many politicians “survive” their scandal may suggest that voters may be able to distinguish their assessment of the politician’s “person” from that of their politics, generally.

To help clarify my definition of scandal, particularly where it fits in the general scandal universe, I contextualize it within the work of others in Table 1:1.

Scandal Role of the Role of the Secrecy Politician Role of Event Public Media Response Opposition Party Adut Critical, audience Transgression needs to be of norms, but willing to can be accused learn of and instead of process verified scandal Undefined Not necessary Not mentioned Not mentioned Thompson Defined -- Audience Can be smaller than needs to involved in the genocide, process unveiling of larger than scandal Likely to be scandal, and

3 parking ticket negatively Crucial Necessary damaged frequently are Nyhan Involved, but not critical and a scandal can exist without Necessary, widespread actively public involved Not necessary coverage throughout Not necessary Not mentioned Necessary Moodie Public needs Necessary, Not specified, Defined, to be willing needs to be a although identified as to be private press competition is norm violation scandalized specifically Not necessary Not mentioned important Continued Table 1:1: Definitions of Scandal

Table 1:1 Continued

Apostolidis & Necessary, but Williams public does not Necessary, need to defined as norm respond in a violation negative way Necessary Not mentioned Not mentioned Not mentioned Bryner Necessary, Necessary Necessary, Not necessary, Not significant Not necessary defined as norm although but common violation, but traditional does not need media does not to be norm need to react to violation to all the scandal and does not immediately

1 need to be

verified

As I have alluded to earlier, I consider corruption and scandal to be separate classes of behavior, with some healthy overlap. Not all corrupt behavior is necessary scandalous, and this oftentimes has very little to do with the severity of the behavior

(Williams and Carpini 2000). Although there are many examples of scandals that might be called corruption, there are cases of scandal that are not.

Corruption: Misuse of public Scandal: office for private gain Norm violation made public

Figure 1:1: Scandal vs. Corruption

Examples of corruption that are not scandal (the left section of the Venn diagram in

Figure 1:1) include both unpublicized cases of misusing public goods for private gain, as well as examples of this behavior which do not violate norms for the officeholder. In certain countries – or regions – graft may be normal, and therefore, even if it were to be made public, it would not qualify as scandal. Examples of scandal that are not corruption

15 include the public uttering of racist or sexist remarks and sexual misbehavior that does not implicate the office held by the politician). The healthy middle portion of the Venn diagram, where an event can be both corruption and scandal, includes events like

Watergate and even the Lewinsky scandal. Both of these involved the misuse of public office (the Presidency) or private gain (Nixon’s campaign, Clinton’s own personal satisfaction). Events can “move” from one portion of the Venn diagram to another – the most common occurrence of this might be when a corruption scandal “breaks,” and becomes a scandal. Table 1:2 shows the distinction between Scandal and corruption as well.

Scandal Corruption

Timeline Usually brief, may Usually long term involve the "breaking" of events that have been unfolding over a long period of time (e.g. Watergate, the Abramoff scandal) Number of One to many Usually many people involved Often not, but Often Systemic? occasionally Illegal? Varies Varies, but usually Public? Yes Not necessarily Table 1:2 Scandal vs. Corruption

Many of the differences between scandal and corruption are somewhat fuzzy and are more indicative of factors which might suggest that a behavior belongs in one category,

16 and not the other. The key component to scandal which is not required for corruption is that it is public, and corruption does not have to be.

Phases of Scandal:

Several of the notable works on scandal conceptualize them as step-wise processes. Thompson (2000) particularly focuses on the process of scandal, from transgression to public evaluation. To Thompson, the scandal must start with a transgression (which violates norms or moral codes). In order to remain a scandal, this transgression needs to contain an element of secrecy, but be either suspected or known by

“nonparticipants,” who then publically express their disapproval of the transgression, thereby “breaking” it. Then, Thompson posits that the disclosure of the event may damage the reputation of the actor.

By describing such a rigid progression, Thompson’s model would exclude many events we commonly understand to be scandals. In 2001. Gary Condit was implicated in the murder of his intern, Chandra Levy, with whom he had been having an affair. The affair, which would count as a scandal if it became public, was probably known to nonparticipants, but those nonparticipants were not the individuals who broke the scandal. The affair broke because Levy was murdered, and Condit needed to come clear with regards to his role in her murder, not because the affair was leaked. Certainly, nonparticipants expressed disapproval after the scandal broke2, but their disapproval was

2 Gary Condit’s scandal dominated the headlines in late 2001 but quickly fell from the public view after the events of September 11th that same year. He was unable to recover from the scandal, even though he was cleared of Levy’s murder, and so he moved to Arizona and started a chain of ice-cream stores.

17 not the cause of the scandal. Similarly, any scandal that is the result of a “live” flub would not count, according to this framework.

I therefore offer an alternative timeline of scandal which allows for the inclusion of a larger variety of events. Scandals, although they can come in many varieties, tend to follow the same general timeline. This structure, while not revolutionary in its implications, can help to contextualize the variety of research that has been done on this topic. Each phase in the scandal timeline is shaped by a variety of factors all of which can help determine what happens to the politician at the end of it.

Phase 1: The Context

The decision to behave in a “scandalous” way is not always fully conscious, and some politicians have claimed ignorance of legal restrictions when they become embroiled in scandal. But, before any scandal is the period where the actors begin to consider acting. During this stage, I argue that there needs to be both a willing actor, or set of actors, and the appropriate context. In other words, the means and the motive both need to be present. If the politician determines that the likelihood of getting caught is too high, he may not choose to act. Similarly, in many cases, if no willing actors can be found with whom the politician can engage in scandalous behavior, no scandal can happen. Some scandals only involve the politician himself; the presence of other actors is only a precondition for certain types of scandal.

Although the politician will not necessarily actively and consciously weigh the advantages and disadvantages of acting, an implicit consideration of these factors does take place for all scandals. In some cases, the consideration process is active, and

18 mistakes when evaluating these factors can lead to a higher likelihood of the illegal or unethical action eventually becoming publically known.

In short, the factors involved that affect the progression of the scandal through

Phase 1 can include individual factors, like politician’s perceived likelihood of being caught, his personality (Constantini 1991), financial need or personal duress, and the politician’s perception of whether he would survive the scandal if caught. Ample work from political science can explain why these factors might matter. Stewart (1994) found that members with lower levels of wealth were more likely to be involved in the House

Bank Scandal – for scandals involving the acquisition of goods, personal wealth could very well be a factor in the politician’s evaluation stage.

Contextual factors are also likely to be a factor in the creation of a scandal-ready environment. The presence or absence of watchdogs (Fording et al 2003) the media profile of the politician, the partisan makeup of the body (Meier and Holbrook 1992) and the presence of willing accomplices (Thompson 2000). Some situations might present politicians with ample resources for scandalous behavior – for example, individuals attempting to bribe them in an environment where the likelihood of getting caught is low.

Individual factors, like a politician’s level of honesty, might render the environmental factors less important.

To some degree, it is impossible to know precisely what happens during Phase 1 because the behavior needs to actually occur in order to become a scandals, and if the behavior does not occur, knowing why it did not occur is empirically impossible.

However, inferences can be made. Changes in the number of scandals over time might

19 be taken as a cue for how many politicians are behaving scandalously – although, not necessarily. In truth, it is impossible to know how many proto-scandals have taken place, so it is also unknowable when it is more or less likely for these to develop and proceed to

Phase 2. But, intuitively, the presence of willing accomplices may be more likely to lead to scandal, while a turbulent political environment with many other scandals may lead to a politician being less likely to engage in Phase 2 because they fear getting caught.

Phase 2: The Scandal Act

Nearly all scandals involve an “event.” The length of this event can vary widely.

Watergate lasted years. Elliot Spitzer’s sex scandal centered around a short-lived event.

The contours and content of the scandal are to a large degree the central feature of the broader scandal event. What happened?

Scandals have traditionally been classified into two major groups: those scandals involving sex and those involving money (Basinger 2013, Nyhan 2010)

However, the diversity in scandal-type is much more complex than that. Thompson, notably, includes “Power” scandals as a third category. 3 Not all sex scandals are alike, both due to the variety of possible misbehaviors as well as how those misbehaviors may mesh with the electorates preconceived attitudes towards the politician. In some cases, a politician might have held himself up as a family-values “standard bearer” and therefore could be perceived as hypocritical, magnifying the impact of the scandal.

3 Although I too found that “abuse of office” scandals, which do not always necessarily result in financial gain for the politician, are common, I would disagree with Thompson’s isolation of “power” scandals into their own category, when many – if not most – political scandals are, to some extent, about power.

Within the “money” category, many varieties of scandal exist. Watergate, which involved a very complex network of corruption, did not occur so that President Nixon could become wealthier. The end goal of Nixon throughout Watergate seemed to be to cover up his involvement in illegal actions taken against the Democratic party. Although money was involved in the scandal throughout, it played a secondary role to that of power. More commonly, politicians appear to engage in activities that funnel public goods unfairly to themselves or those close friends. Bribery, once commonplace, is still a common scandal type. Politicians frequently pay themselves from their campaign money, which is also (for the most part) illegal. There have been numerous examples of politicians receiving discounts on services in exchange for favoritism later. This is just a small sample of the variety of money-related scandals in recent history, and it is already clear that these can all vary in magnitude. A simple “favor” in exchange for a small payout may seem insignificant compared to a politician embezzling public tax dollars to give himself a more lavish lifestyle. So, not only can the explicit content of the scandal vary, but so too can the number of victims.

Some scandals can exist without any “victims,” (consensual sex between one unmarried, but closeted, homosexual politician and a nonpolitician), while others can have hundreds of victims who don’t necessarily see themselves as such (if a politician were to grant special treatment to a more expensive contractor, at the expense of the taxpayers), and others can have smaller numbers of very clear victims (Ted Kennedy and

Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquidick). Others still can have multiple victims, but the audience may disagree about who the victim is (Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica

Lewinsky is a good example of this, as both Hillary Clinton and Lewinsky herself might call themselves victims, but the public might see neither, both, or only one as the victim of that event). Certainly, the presence, number, and proximity of victims adds to the scandal – both in terms of the likelihood of being caught, and then in terms of the evaluation of the scandal by the public, if it were to break.

The cover-up

For every scandal, the politician has the ability to keep the scandal from becoming public knowledge. The media can sometimes be implicated in this cover-up step as well, which can occur but does not necessarily need to be present for an event to progress.

Sometimes, a leak breaks slowly. As the politician becomes aware that the scandal is getting out of control, he might attempt to cover it up – often times, this can make the subsequent aftermath even more severe. The presence or absence of a cover-up is itself a factor to consider when examining a scandal.

Phase 3: The Media Intervention

Usually, scandals break by being covered by an attentive media. At this point, the scandal is thus defined as a scandal – if a scandal does not have a Phase 3, it cannot be considered a scandal. However, variation exists within Phase 3. The media can eviscerate the politician, or they can choose to deemphasize the story. This is likely not done out of the goodness of their collective hearts, but instead it depends on the newsworthiness of the event. As I will show, coverage of scandals fell off during the aftermath of September 11th. This may be because politicians were behaving less

22 scandalously, or it may also be because the media were busy covering issues of national security.

Media famine is certainly one possible predictor of a scandal’s likelihood of being covered (Nyhan 2013). If the media is occupied with other newsworthy stories, a politician’s sexual misconduct may not demand as much attention. As media coverage essentially “makes” scandal, a media that relegates a story to the back page (or doesn’t cover it at all) will affect the scandal’s trajectory.

Similarly, the media also can vary in the tone of their coverage. As Owen (2000) describes, the coverage of the Lewinsky scandal focused largely on the salaciousness of

Clinton’s misdeeds, thereby framing it as “entertainment” news and allowing people’s opinions about Clinton to focus on his character, rather than his competence. Funk

(1996) shows that scandals that affect individual trait assessments of competence are more damning than those that affect assessments of character traits (like warmth), and so the tabloidization of Clinton’s scandal had implications for citizen evaluation.

The politicians can also “fight” the media’s portrayal of their behaviors. This was done masterfully by Hillary Clinton during both the Whitewater scandal and the

Lewinsky scandal; she accused the media of engaging in a “right-wing conspiracy” and this accusation was found to be compelling by liberals and moderates (Miller 1999). The opposition party’s role in the media portrayal of scandal could also affect the rest of the scandal – in the case of the Lewinsky scandal, the opposition party was actually vilified by the left for, eventually, a relentless and distracting pursuit of Clinton over what many eventually considered to be a private action (Miller 1999). Groups like moveon.org

23 capitalized on public frustration and were able to strengthen the Democratic party’s platform and Clinton’s own job approval rating, despite the scandal.

The Clinton scandal was also one that demonstrated how nuanced the media phase of scandal can be. His affair with Lewinsky was officially released by the right- wing blog The Drudge Report, which also criticized Newsweek for sitting on the story.

The Washington Post did not cover the affair until four days after the story broke, at which point it became a national event. According to my definition, the scandal became a scandal as soon as the Drudge Report covered it – however, if no national outlet had ever covered it, history would probably remember Lewinsky very differently than they do now. The 2012 consular attack in Benghazi, Libya, is a very different would-be scandal.

Mainstream media covered the event, but confusion about the sequence of events gave rise to a vocal right-wing contingent claiming that the media was biased in its presentation of the attack. Obama himself accused Republicans of focusing on “phony scandals.” Right-wing Republicans, as of September 2013, still refer to a Benghazi

“cover-up” and “scandal,” and House Speaker John Boehner has referred to himself as

“obsessed” with the issue4, but the mainstream media’s coverage of the attack has been muted.

The two examples: Lewinsky versus Benghazi, highlight both the importance of the mainstream media’s coverage of a scandal, as well as alternative media outlet’s ability to keep certain events in the spotlight despite mainstream coverage. To some extent, both scandals had similar affects. A May 2013 Pew poll found that 41% of

4 From a May 2013 Politico article. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/john- boehner-benghazi-91235.html

Republican respondents said that Benghazi was the biggest scandal in American history,5 although most Americans were not even following the events. Fischle (2000) and Zaller

(1998) found that individual opinions about Clinton were barely affected by the

Lewinsky scandal. Both examples also highlight how the media can affect the next – and often concurrent -- step in scandal, which is that of public evaluation.

Period 4: Public Evaluation

Concurrent with Phase 3 is the period where constituent public opinion begins to take shape. Citizens, informed by the media about the scandal, will begin processing it – and, importantly, the politician will also begin becoming aware of the results of this processing.

Public evaluations of politicians, as a process, is one that has attracted substantial attention from political scientists. Dozens of factors can affect the opinions citizens have of their politicians, and these factors can include traits of both the evaluator and the evaluated. To a large extent, the process of evaluation of scandal is affected by the preceding three phases of scandal – what did the politician do? How did the media frame the events of the scandal? Do the citizens reside in a region known for corruption? All of these scandal-specific factors can affect the processing of any particular scandal, in addition to the other major components of political evaluation (including the politician’s party identification, race, gender, seniority, competence, warmth, perceived effectiveness, and so on).

5 http://go.bloomberg.com/political-capital/2013-05-13/81559/

The limited work that has been completed on the evaluation of politicians who were involved in scandal suggests that those same political characteristics which can generate positive evaluation, generally, can also lead to positive evaluation in times of scandal. Incumbency can work two ways – on the one hand, longer-term incumbents may be more likely to retire in the face of scandal, but on the other, they may be protected from negative evaluation because constituents have better established opinions about these politicians (and may have also voted for them in the past).

The type of scandal can also interact with the constituent evaluations of these politicians. Funk (1996) found that scandals which affected constituent perceptions of the politician’s level of competence were more damaging than those which affected evaluations of the politician’s warmth. This finding speaks to the way individuals were able to both negatively evaluate Bill Clinton’s behaviors towards Monica Lewinsky but also hold positive holistic evaluations – these individuals did not deem his behavior with

Lewinsky to be relevant to his competence.

These factors, as well as the way the politician interprets the consequences of these factors, influence the ultimate phase of a scandal, Phase 5.

Phase 5: The Outcome

Much of the research on scandal survival has focused on those politicians who seek reelection (Basinger 2013, Long 2011, Hall and Van Heuwling 1995). Hall and Van

Heuwling (1995) find that the decision to run or retire is affected by a member’s length of time in office – or, at least it was during the House Bank Scandal. However, winning or losing are only two of a much more complicated stage. A politician may not have a

26 choice about their plan of action – they can be expelled, prosecuted, sent to prison, or recalled. They may lose in the primary, or they may lose in the general. Sometimes, they may retire in the immediate election following their scandal, but attributing that retirement to their involvement in the scandal is unfounded as they may have wanted to retire regardless. Rarely, a politician survives a scandal and returns to office later (Mark

Sanford, a South Carolina Republican, is a good example, as is Florida politician Alcee

Hastings). Very little research has addressed differentiations in the outcome of scandal, but this is the stage where the behavior is resolved. New laws – or greater transparency -- could be, and often are, the result of scandal.

Summary

Although every scandal is different, they all tend to follow the five phases. Each of these steps can lead to interesting question best addressed by political science study.

Are some politicians more likely than others to get involved in scandal (Phase 1)? Why?

How do individual factors, like the party of the politician, affect the type of scandal they might get involved in (Phase 2)? Why might a politician try to cover up the event, or – more interestingly – why not (Phase 2)? How does coverage by the media (Phase 3) influence constituent evaluation (Phase 4)? Are certain scandals more “media-friendly” than others (Phase 3)? Do all constituents evaluate scandals in the same way (Phase 5), and if not, how do individual differences influence evaluation? How do all of these periods culminate in a politician’s decision to run or not to run (Phase 5)? And, what scandals are survivable? The purpose of this dissertation will be to study scandals as

27 phenomena touching on a variety of important political concepts, from partisan differences to public opinion to political decision-making.

This dissertation has three major empirical chapters. In the first of these chapters,

I discuss those factors that might contribute to the presence or absence of scandal in the

United States. To do this, I construct an original database of scandal by looking for instances of scandal in major American newspapers. I use this database to explore the origins of scandal. Fundamentally, do individual characteristics, like gender and partisanship, lead someone to become involved in a scandal? Or, are scandals predicted by contextual factors, like the political culture of a region? I find that contextual factors outperform those individual factors as predictors of scandal, and that at the state level, more professionalized legislatures are more likely to have many scandals.

In my second chapter, I will use the same database to explore the likelihood of a politician surviving his or her scandal. The range of outcomes for scandal survival vary widely, and I empirically explore the factors that explain scandal survival, finding that incumbency is by-and-large the most powerful predictor of scandal survival.

Finally, I craft and administer an original experiment to a random sample of university students to explore how individual responses to scandal vary as a function of the individuals’ moral preferences. Those individuals who believe that purity is a powerful and important moral foundation are more likely to punish politicians who engage in scandals that violate that moral foundation, even controlling for partisanship.

Throughout the dissertation, I explain shortcomings of my approach to scandal, as well as speculating on ways that this work could be developed in future research.

CHAPTER 2: ORIGINS OF SCANDAL

Having defined scandal in the previous chapter, I now intend to document the origins of scandal in the United States. As I discussed earlier, the early stages of scandal are complex and often take place over an extended time period. Before we can consider an event a scandal, several events need to occur. First, a politician, working in a specific historical and political context, needs to make the decision to engage in those activities which could result in scandal (Phase 1), the event needs to occur (Phase 2), and the public need to be made aware of the event (Phase 3). In this chapter, I will discuss those factors which affect the way the scandal act progresses through these three phases.

Do scandals occur randomly, unaffected by changes in the political context or the individual characteristics of a politician, or can they be systematically predicted by variants in the political climate or by the traits of politicians? If scandals indicate networks of corruption, as they did during Watergate, increases in those factors that can lead to corruption may plausibly be associated with corresponding increases in the number of scandals. Similarly, different types of politicians might have different personal traits which could increase or decrease a politician’s likelihood of becoming involved in scandal. Alternatively, the individual might need to have both the right personal traits and be in the right situation for a scandal event to occur

Two broad literatures in political science speak to increases or decreases in the likelihood of a political scandal beginning. The first of these speaks to the causes of corruption in other countries, and by extension, would postulate that scandals are consequences of systematic and structural factors. The second literature, speaking to individual differences among politicians as determinants of their own political behavior, might predict that a higher likelihood of scandal is a consequence of individual characteristics, including a politician’s gender, party, race, level of ambition, or personal wealth.

The media also play a critical role in this process. Scandals do not exist without the media assuring that constituents are aware of the politician’s misdeeds. A healthy literature exists which has explored the dynamics of scandals as presented by the media, and I will discuss this literature and how the media serves to hurry along or stymy a scandal’s progression.

To explore the factors involved in the first two phases of scandal, and begin to study the role of the media, I create a unique database of US political scandals and use this to demonstrate how members of the US Congress involved with scandal differ from those who did not become involved in scandal.

Phases One and Two: Situational versus Individualist Factors

What causes scandal? This question can be approached in myriad ways, but scholars have tended to reach the answer from two different places, as is common in political psychology. Some scholars focus on factors that create an environment ripe for scandal, while others examine the characteristics of individuals that could lead them to

30 scandal. The literature on those systemic factors resulting in scandal usually focuses on the causes of corruption. As I discussed in the last chapter, scandals are discreet moments in American politics. Corruption, conversely, is a systemic phenomenon.

Certain “moments” of corruption involving a set of actors and a particular action, can result in scandal. For the purposes of this dissertation, the political system may fundamentally be seen as “corrupt” but corruption as I define it is repeated and systemic behavior by parties, individuals, or organizations which involves the misappropriation of public goods for private gain. Given this conceptual distinction, it does remain true that much more research has been completed on the causes of corruption, particularly from a comparative perspective, than the causes of scandal. Although this existing literature can inform discussions of scandal in an American context, there are some differences that make the corruption literature not fully useful for discussions of scandal. It is plausible that countries with high levels of corruption are likely to have fewer cases of scandal, as corrupt behavior may be seen as the norm and scandals involve deviation from the norm in order to be defined as such. No study has systematically explored the causes of scandals involving presidents, and few studies have found any regular predictors of involvement in scandal by members of Congress (Nyhan 2011, Basinger 2013, Long

2011). Truly, despite the preponderance of scandals, the origins of scandal remain largely unexplored.

Systemic and Political Factors

Even though corruption does not perfectly correspond to scandal, the literature on causes of corruption points to several useful factors which might lead to scandal. After

31 all, as I described, scandals could be borne of corruption. Globally, the causes of corruption include a free and easily accessible press, a higher number of women in government, open trade, and being a highly developed liberal democracy (Treisman

2007, Goel and Nelson 2010). Not surprisingly, the United States is commonly seen as having a relatively low level of endemic corruption, as measured by perceptions of corruption.6

Given the particularities of the US’s political system, including a federal structure, a large and diverse citizenry, and regional political subcultures, some of the same factors that lead to certain regions of the world being more or less likely to have high levels of corruption can lead to regional differences here. For example, the number of women in state and federal office may be related to levels of corruption across states.

Generally speaking, however, the global determinants of scandal are not likely to speak to differences in levels of corruption across the US States, as the major determinants are not factors that vary by state (like free and fair elections).

One facet of the US political system is the presence of long-standing urban machines and clientelism. Areas with political machines have, at various points in US

History, not had free and fair elections or true electoral competition, and these have in essence created areas of the country where some of the global causes of corruption (but not necessarily scandal) might be present. Urban hubs in Boston, Chicago, New York

6 The two most popular measures of international corruption are those created by the nonprofit NGO Transparency International and the index constructed by the World Bank. Both of these measures, as well as the methodologies behind them, can be found on the organization’s websites, at http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#reports and http://www.transparency.org/research/cpi/overview.

City, and Detroit are well known for long and storied histories of tit-for-tat politics, and urbanism has been shown to be associated with higher levels of corruption (Rose-

Ackerman 1999, Meier and Holbrook 1993). Although the power of these networks has been vastly diminished due to reforms in voting laws, they have not vanished. Even recently, former Governor Rod Blagojavich was imprisoned for attempting to sell a recently opened Senate seat in Illinois, a state famed for its vast political machine. The causal relationship here may be two-fold. Not only might the actual clientelism itself be seen as corrupt, but efforts to maintain the finances necessary for large clientele networks might lead to additional corruption (Singer 2009).

Measuring the extent of political machinery in a region is problematic and challenging. The term is difficult to quantify. As Howard Gosnell points out, one can use the term to refer to the Tammany Hall machine in New York City, or the LaFollette machine of the Midwestern United States (Gosnell 1933). Whereas the Tammany Hall machine was set up to carefully allocate resources to political allies via clientele networks, LaFollette’s extensive political machine was focused more on the mobilization of voters for his own campaign. These are very different, and for the purposes of corruption, only the Tammany Hall example is relevant. Sometimes the machine is limited to a specific point in time, while other times a machine lasts beyond the reign of one individual (the Daley family in Chicago, for example). The entire US South has had political machine characteristics for different regions and different parts of time.

The difficulties in defining political machines does not mean that it is impossible to quantify the characteristics of machines that might lead them to precipitate scandals.

Political machines are often found in “one party” regions – but not all one-party regions are famed for their political machinery. Fording et al (2003) examined the strictness of ethics laws across Kentucky and found that cities with greater levels of electoral competition and a more active media were both more likely to implement more stringent ethics regulations.

Some work has been done examining corruption across US states. In a 1992 piece, Meier and Holbrook outline four potential “categories” of causes of corruption across states. Most of their categories focus on the political system. The four categories that Meier and Holbrook discuss are: historic and cultural, political (including the competitiveness of the political system), bureaucratic, and structural factors. The only category they found to not be linked to changes in the frequency of corruption was the

“structural” category. They found no evidence that states with stricter campaign finance requirements had lower rates of corruption (see Fording et al 2003 for an alternative finding). Meier and Holbrook examined rates of prosecutions of public officials, from all levels of government and both elected and appointed. Although they did control for the quality and size of the state’s judicial system, this approach does pose some problems in that areas with many prosecutions may have more prosecutions because they have better enforcement and monitoring of corruption.

Other work has supported and added to Meier and Holbrook’s finding, providing additional evidence that regional factors might influence the level of corruption.

Engaging in a similar research study, Glaeser and Saks found that the level of education in a region decreased the level of corruption in that region (2006). Interestingly, Meier

34 and Holbrook (1992) did not find that at least one of the variables traditionally associated with machine politics (when other regional factors were controlled for) were associated with higher levels of corruption. Political machine were often set up to allow for certain ethnic groups to control the allocation of government resources (primarily for areas with historically high Italian and Irish ancestry). When Meier and Holbrook explored the relationship between areas with higher levels of Irish and Italian ancestry and the current levels of corruption, they actually found that areas with Irish and Italian ancestry had lower levels of corruption.

The argument that electoral competition might be related to corruption is two- fold. One might plausibly assume that places where politics are more competitive are going to have more political operatives engaging in opposition research and uncovering instances of corruption involving the opposition party. Conversely, it is also possible that areas with more political competition discourage corruption by increasing the “costs” of engaging in corrupt practices. Knowing that competitive elections may be on the horizon might plausibly discourage individuals from engaging in corrupt activities in the first place. Meier and Holbrook (1992) found that party competition did, indeed, markedly reduce the presence of corruption in politics, even when they included political appointees and unelected individuals in their sample.

At the state level, several characteristics of state governments could possibly explain differences in the number of scandals observed. Most intuitively, in states with more state legislators, it stands to reason that we would also see more scandals. As is the case globally, states with entrenched and effective watchdog systems may see fewer

35 scandals, assuming those watchdog systems deter misdeeds. Conversely, these watchdog systems and engaged media may also bring more scandals to light, increasing the appearance of corruption, increasing perceptions of corruption (Pelligrini 2011, Gross and Goidel 2003, Primo and Milyo 2006, Rosenson 2009)

Political scientists have also studied variations in the level of professionalism across state legislatures. Professional legislatures are those where the legislature is in session for long periods of the year, legislators support large staffs, and where compensation is high enough for legislators to support themselves without needing to have additional jobs. The consequences of professionalism are in dispute. More professional legislatures can simultaneously attract higher-quality members, but also insulate those members from their constituents. New Hampshire, which is a state with a nonprofessional “part-time” legislature, has a legislative body of 424 members, or approximately one member for every 3,000 citizens – certainly, this proportion of citizens to legislators provides for more opportunity for contact. However, the quality of these members may not be as high as it is in states where legislating is a full-time job.

Professional legislators, by attracting members with higher levels of ambition, can lead to a more responsive government (Maestas 2000). Were this to extend into the world of corruption and scandal, one might expect these members to be less likely to engage in scandal. However, members in more professional legislators may also be more beholden to lobbyists, moneyed interests, and other forces which could serve to distract them from legislating. Ambition, as I will discuss later, is a trait commonly associated with politicians who are more likely to behave dishonestly, and the presence of more

36 ambitious legislators could lead to higher instances of scandal. Similarly, more professional legislatures, by virtue of being in session for longer periods of time, may draw more media attention, thereby bringing more scandals to light.

Individual Factors

Not to be underestimated here is the power for the politician himself to be predisposed to scandal, not because of the location of his district, but because of his own personality traits. Almost no research has been completed to explore those characteristics which might lead to certain politicians being more or less likely to be become involved in scandal. The one paper that does account for this finds that Democrats, younger members of Congress, and less wealthy members were more likely to overdraft checks in the House Bank Scandal of the early 90s (Stewart 1994). The most perplexing finding, which was that Democrats were more likely to be involved, was not explained. However, even were there to be a compelling reason why Democrats were more likely to be involved in the House Bank Scandal, it is unlikely that the political context could be fully divorced from the individual predisposition. A network of Democratic members writing bad checks is different than a group of Democrats writing bad checks who have no chance to interact with each other. In other words, the counter-case to the House Bank

Scandal doesn’t exist -- there has not been a similar scandal involving a majority of

Republicans. In this way, even though the House Bank Scandal is compelling as a case of study, the factors that make it relatively easy to study (one particular event, involving many individuals simultaneously, with clear and easily measurable variation on the independent variables) also make it harder to generalize findings to other cases of

37 scandal. We don’t know how the House Bank Scandal would have played out were

Republicans involved in more overdrafts; nor do we have a similar case where the actual scandal type was different.

However, the political science literature provides amble work on differences among politicians and how this affects their performance in office and political effectiveness. This literature could provide compelling explanations for why certain individuals might be more likely to become involved in scandal.

Gender

Women have always been under-represented in Congress, but they have also been the object of study for several decades. In an early study researching the motivations driving University of California students into activism, Costantini (1990) found that men were driven more by political ambition than women. Political ambition, as Costantini defined it, was the desire for “power, prestige, and profit” (1990, 746). As I have argued in the previous chapter, politicians do not often “stumble” into scandal. In the majority of cases, politicians make choices to behave illegally or counter to cultural norms.

Costantini’s finding suggest that the desire for power, prestige, and profit might lead politicians to behave more aggressively to achieve said power. If this were true, we would expect to see fewer females involved in political scandals, simply because achieving power, prestige, and profit is involved in so many scandals.

Generally, much of the work involving studies of women holding office explores the ways in which they lead. Women are seen as more cooperative leaders (Volden et al

2013) and some have opined that women in power would bring about a “less conflict-

38 prone world” (Fukuyama 1998). Similarly, on a global scale, more women in office have been associated with lower levels of corruption (Triesman 2000). This same literature has found that women are less likely than men to be involved in bribery (Hunt 2007). In the comparative context, it is highly possible that factors leading to less corruption are highly correlated with a higher number of women in office, leading this causal argument to be suspect (Sung 2003). Rather than the “truism” that women in office can lead to

“cleaner’ government, Sung argues – and finds evidence to support – that systems themselves can increase or decrease levels of corruption. More liberal systems, with freer and more frequent elections, are the true determinants of corruption, not a higher proportion of women in higher office.

This argument is not settled. Individuals tend to perceive women leaders as more

“honest,” and have continued to do so for decades (Alexander and Anderson 1993,

Okimoto and Brescoll 2010). Most high-profile political scandals have involved men.

Experimental evidence on corruption and gender does suggest that, at least in a Western context, men are more likely to engage in bribery than women are (Alatas et al 2009).

More women in government, cross-nationally, does tend to decrease the level of corruption (Triesman 2000, Dollar et al 2001), and, as voters, women are less tolerant of corruption (Swamy et al 2001).

Partisanship:

There is little to lead one to believe that Democrats or Republicans might be more or less inclined to become involved in scandals. Both parties have held power at various points in recent American history, and although Democrats do tend to have more

39 representation in their ranks from women and racial minorities, there is no reason that partisanship itself would lead one to be more or less inclined to behave scandalously.

Regardless of the lack of theories hypothesizing differences among Democrats or

Republicans being involved in corruption and scandal, some literature has suggested that

Democrats may have a slightly higher likelihood of becoming involved in scandal

(Stewart 1994). This research, however, concerned one specific time period and one specific scandal. A longitudinal, controlled study of partisan differences in corruption has not yet been completed.

Despite the fact that Republicans and Democrats may be similar as politicians, there is certainly ample reason to believe that their constituents might evaluate them differently based on their own personality and ideological differences. A Republican representing a district of devout Christian evangelicals may be more easily condemned during a sex scandal than might a Democrat who represents a district of social liberals.

This may affect facets of the scandal itself, with Republicans or Democrats being more or less likely to “survive” the scandal, but these nuances will be discussed in the following chapters.

Wealth:

It seem sensible that politicians who are less wealthy might have more to gain from becoming involved in scandal, and at least one study has found this to be the case

(Stewart 1994). Many scandals involve the pursuit of resources, and so those politicians who are wealthier might have less need to endanger their political careers by accepting bribes. Other than the work by Stewart, there is a relative dearth of studies on the effect

40 personal wealth has on behavior while in Congress; what has been done tends to focus on how wealth affects retirement decisions (Hall and Heuwling 1995). However, if scandals do arise from the desire to acquire more resources by abusing one’s position or engaging in bribery, it would stand to reason that personal wealth could be a factor in a politician’s decision to behave illegally.

Race:

Again, there is no convincing hypothetical argument that would lead one to presume that involvement in scandal might be affected by a politician’s race. Those factors that might correlate with race (representing a district in a one-party area, for example) all provide more convincing explanations for any differences in the presence of one race in scandal. That being said, Meier and Holbrook (1992) did find that minorities appeared to be targeted in corruption cases at higher rates than are whites. These sorts of phenomena might lead to it appearing as though minorities are more likely to be involved in corruption and scandal than are whites, but this may simply be an artifact of differences in targeting.

Personality:

Challenges exist to systematically studying the personality traits of politicians, although work has been done on public assessments of the traits of their politicians.

Certain personality traits more common in politicians than in non-politicians (like, for example, narcissism) could lead to the politician being more likely to become involved in scandal. Jerald Post argued that the upper echelons of power are filled with "successful narcissists," and narcissistic traits could plausibly be associated with a politician's

41 predisposition to scandal (Post 1993, 99). One of these potential scandal-associated predispositions is the belief of narcissists that the tendency to over-assess their own likelihood of success. This could lead them to engage in potentially risky activities, because they do not believe that they will be "caught."

Other personality traits of leaders could explain propensity to become involved in scandal, although given the difficulties in performing systematic analyses of these traits, I will not attempt to do so in this dissertation. Leaders have been found to vary across three critical dimensions: power, achievement and affiliation (Winter 1987). The power motive is common in politicians and describes the general tendency for politicians to seek out and be concerned about impact and prestige. Risk taking is associated with the power motive (Winter and Stewart 1978) and could therefore plausibly be associated with the propensity to become involved in scandals. The other two motives commonly associated with leaders are the achievement motive, which is generally described as a "concern for excellence," and the affiliation motive, which concerns interpersonal relationships and social harmony.

Exploring Phase Three: The Media Intervention

To even become a fully developed scandal, the occurrence needs to gain traction with the press. Nyhan even goes so far as to call scandal a “co-production” of the press and the opposition party. As I have articulated earlier, media and public coverage is a necessary component to scandal, but it is not sufficient. Similarly, my definition does not specify the need for external, partisan, involvement in order for a scandal to occur.

Requiring an active and involved opposition party would imply that scandals could not

42 occur in one party states or regions, which – although possible – is a testable hypothesis.

However, I do maintain that an attentive media is indeed a necessary condition for scandals to occur. If a potentially-scandalous event falls on deaf ears, it will not become a fully-fledged scandal. The media can become preoccupied by other events. The “wag- the-dog” phenomena, coined by Barry Levinson to describe when Presidents encourage international conflict as a way to distract the public, may not be borne out in academic literature as a reasonable strategy, but it is hard to argue that the events around September

11th, 2001, did not turn the media’s attention away from domestic politics.

Eisensee and Stromberg (2007) explored similar dynamics in a study of media attention to natural disasters. Natural disasters, globally, are common. However, their coverage on network news is highly variable, and the author’s tested whether “media famine” was necessary to precipitate coverage of natural disasters in less “newsworthy” countries, particularly those in Western Africa. Nyhan (2013) controlled for the media’s attention to other news when he explored the effect of media saturation on scandal coverage, finding that time times of media famine were indeed related to increases in the reporting about political scandal.

Some scholars have studied the media’s coverage of scandal in its own right.

Coverage of scandalous politicians is often considered to be a less-than-ideal way to present political information to the American public (Kalb 2001), although some work has found that viewers who watch stories about political scandal are also likely to accidentally view more traditional “hard news” stories as well (Baum 2002). Work on the media has also examined framing (Shah et al. 2002, Joslyn 2003), candidate image

43 management (Blaney and Benoit 2001), and the pulp-news form that scandal coverage often takes (Tumber and Waisbord 2004). Joslyn (2004) does find that individuals who view stories about scandal when they are framed as “sex stories” are less likely to think that they are influenced by these stories than the general public, as opposed to those who viewed stories about scandal as media overzealousness.

The media’s role in the “co-production” of scandal, as Nyhan would describe it, is more complex than simply rushing to cover any cases of indiscretion. Gamson (2001) found differences in the way political sex scandals were covered. To avoid being classified as “tabloid” journalism, mainstream media outlets are quick to cover sex scandals as cases of moral decay in American society or examples of institutional crisis.

HYPOTHESES

As I have described, the existent literature does not fully describe those conditions which lead to scandal, and once the scandal moment has started, which factors lead to the scandal gaining sufficient traction with the media to become a true scandal event.

However, previous scholars have identified a myriad of factors which have had determinant effects on specific scandals. This chapter will test some of these previously identified factors on a larger, more generalizable sample, as opposed to on a more limited pool of only politicians involved in one specific scandal.

Situational Hypotheses

First, I propose two hypotheses to explore those systematic factors that may lead to a more scandal-prone environment. Meier and Holbrook (1992) found that systemic factors, like the presence of watchdogs, decreased the likelihood of scandals in certain

44 regions of the US. They did not, however, explore levels of professionalism across these states. Just as watchdogs may keep corruption in check – and, in doing so, make it public

– a more professionalized political system may bring scandals and corruption to light.

This does not imply that there are more scandals in more professional areas, only that those scandals that exist may be more likely to be made public. Therefore, my first hypothesis does not explain the mechanism by which scandals come into being, only that more professional legislative bodies will be associated with higher levels of corruption, and therefore, scandal.

Hypothesis One: Bodies with higher levels of professionalism will see more cases

of scandal.

The literature also suggests that, within democracies, political competition may serve as a deterrent to political scandal. Nyhan (2013) goes so far as to suggest that an active and engaged opposition party is necessary to the formation of a scandal event. In the United States, elections serve as an opportunity for power to transition between an incumbent and a challenger and they are often opportunities for partisan control of a district to shift. The mechanism here is clear: around elections, not only will there be more coverage of politicians, but the politician’s opponent will be more likely to draw attention to the politician’s misdeeds.

Hypothesis Two: Scandals will be more likely to be observed near elections.

Federal elections in the United States occur every two years, and so were Hypothesis

Two to be confirmed, I would expect to see more scandals during election years.

Furthermore, if it is indeed true that scandals are actively created by the opposition party,

45 we might expect to see more scandals during times when real partisan competition exists

– in other words, we would see fewer scandals during period of time or locations when one party is dominant.

The following hypotheses address those individual characteristics that may lead politicians to become involved in scandal. The amount of existent research on this topic is quite small, but related political science and political psychology literatures do suggest that certain traits, including gender and personal wealth, might be related to scandal propensity.

The literature on gender suggests that female politicians will be less likely than male politicians to become involved in all varieties of scandal. Although Sung (2003) disputes the oft-cited idea that women are somehow more “moral” than men, most studies have found that regions with greater numbers of women in office have less “corrupt” government. The American public generally describes female candidates as more trustworthy, compassionate, and honest than their male counterparts (Anderson and

Alexander 1993). Female political activists also tend to be less motivated by political ambition than males, and this more muted desire for power and dominance could credibly lead women to be less likely to become involved in political scandal, particularly those that involve the abuse of office for personal gain (Okimoto and Brescoll 2010).

Hypothesis Three: Male politicians will be more likely to become involved in

scandals than female politicians.

Stewart (1994) found that wealthier members of Congress were less likely to overdraft their House bank accounts in 1992. The logic behind this is straightforward: wealthier

46 members should have less of a need to acquire more resources, and this is the basis for my fourth hypothesis.

Hypothesis Four: Wealthier members of Congress will be less likely to become

involved in scandals that involve the acquisition of resources.

Media Intervention Hypotheses

Ample literature suggests that times of media famine may be related to an increase in “soft” reporting, as reporters struggle to produce content. This leads me to my fifth hypothesis, which expects the number of scandals to be negatively related to the occurrence of more newsworthy events.

Hypothesis Five: The number of scandals will increase during periods of media famine.

In order to address these hypotheses systematically, I created a database documenting every publicized scandal in the post-Watergate era. I can compare this database, which contains cases where a scandal developed, to a complete dataset of every member of

Congress in order to see how the scandal population differs from scandals who have not become involved in scandal. This database also allows me to track the number of identified scandals throughout time, which allows me to test the hypotheses related to the rise of scandal.

THE DATA

One of the major components of any scandal is that it generates media attention.

Therefore, I used newspaper archives to find past scandals.7 A basic search of Lexis

Nexis academic (scanda*) picks up many articles, most of which are actually irrelevant.

In order to be thorough, I used this broad search but chose to simply ignore the scandals relating to athletes or other countries. Initially, I searched for scanda*, but after cross checking the first few years of my database with a list of scandals available on

Wikipedia.org, I realized that I missed many that never used the word scandal, instead using the word “bribery.” To pick up those, I changed the search to “Scanda* OR bribe*,” which generated a much more complete list.

Previous work on scandal has relied on cases of investigation by the House or

Senate ethics committees (Basinger 2013, Long 2011). Given that my conceptualization of scandal depends on an active and involved media, I did not want to explore only cases of official investigation. Furthermore, some scandals may not technically be against

House or Senate rules, and I did not want to limit my research to only federal scandals.

7 Defining the boundaries around my database as events that were mentioned in the media begs the tree and forest question: if a tree falls, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If a politician misbehaves, but no one knows about it, it is still a scandal? As I established earlier, I do not believe a scandal is a scandal unless the public become aware of it, and the most sure-fire way to assure that the public become aware of a political misstep is for that misstep to make it into the news. This is, of course, problematic to some degree, as it is almost certain that some political misdeeds are never reported, and also likely that some misdeeds are never deemed scandals. Regardless, given the variety of ways a politician can engage in scandalous activity, and the lack of any other source data on political scandal, using media reports was the most practical and comprehensive way to create this database.

The Lexis Nexis database indexes hundreds of news sources, so I narrowed the list of sources to nine major US newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post,

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Denver Post, the San

Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times, and The Houston Chronicle. I also searched

Associated Press wires. These newspapers are all nationally respected major papers which index their articles on Lexis Nexis (although several of them do not index as far back as 1975, see Appendix A for a list of the papers, their earliest index, and the number of scandals I originally identified from the paper). For the New York Times and the

Associated Press wires, I limited the search to only include articles that are classified as

“North or South America” stories. This eliminated many of the international scandal articles. In keeping with my own definition of scandal, I did not include anything related to “the scandal of campaign finance” or broader concepts and only included scandal events with a clear beginning and end.

In order to filter out redundant articles or articles that were political scandals but that fell out of my search range, I would add “and not” terms to my search. These varied by time period; for example, in 1975 I excluded all articles that included the word

“Watergate.”

I included only a small portion of the American political scandals in my database.

Excluded from this database were scandals involving:

1) Any scandal that occurred before 1975 and was resolved before 1975. In

some cases, a scandal might not have been uncovered until after 1975, even

though the actions technically took place before 1975. 1975 itself was chosen

because it was the first full calendar year after President Nixon resigned, and as

such, marks the beginning of the post-Watergate era.

2) The President of the United States. Although Presidents are involved in many

scandals, they also are unique in that between 1975 and 2011, only 7 individuals

have held this job. Therefore, not much variation on the outcome (whether or not

the President “survived” the scandal) exists – in fact, they all survived their

scandals.

3) Unelected political figures. This includes all Cabinet members. Although

these people are political actors, they are not comparable to politicians because

they are accountable to another politician, not the general public.

4) Cabinet office holders at the state level, even if these people are elected.

5) Candidates for office involved in a scandal while campaigning – excluding

incumbents or eventual victors.

This means that the overall database includes Governors, US House members, US

Senators, state Senators and Representatives, some Judges, and some mayors.

Even with these restrictions, the number of articles returned was often unwieldy.

I viewed only two sentence highlights from each article – enough to glean whether the article was about a scandal involving a university football team or a scandal involving a

US Congressperson. After collecting the articles, I read through the relevant ones to identify the actor involved, the actions leading to the scandal, and the outcome, which I entered into a working database, along with the newspaper the article came from and the date on which it was published. The date, in most cases, coincides with the period the

50 scandal broke, but in some cases, the first article I encountered about the scandal was published well after it happened. In other cases, the date is actually well before the scandal became large – this is particularly true in cases where federal prosecution eventually took place.

To check the robustness of the sampling method, I consulted a fairly comprehensive list at Wikipedia.org. While Wikipedia is hardly the definitive source for information, if it contained information about many scandals I had not found in the news, the validity of the sampling method would be suspect. This was not the case -- only four scandals on the Wikipedia list were not found via the news, and my sampling method found dozens more than were available on Wikipedia.

The Variables

Once the scandals were collected, I coded additional information pertaining to each politician and scandal. The unit of analysis here is a politician + scandal combination – the House Bank Scandal8, for example, involved many politicians and each of those politicians would be in the database once. Similarly, if a politician was involved in several scandals during the time period, they would be included multiple times (Kwame Kirkpatrick is an example). The variables for this database fell into three major categories: Characteristics of the politician, characteristics of the scandal, and characteristics of the electorate. A full dictionary of these variables can be found in

Appendix B.

8 For this case, several dozen politicians were involved in this scandal. Many of these individuals only over-drafted a few checks and were never investigated or found guilty of any misbehavior. To prevent this scandal from dominating the database, I only included the 22 individuals who were investigated for serious malfeasance.

I classified the type of scandal in which the politician was involved. I roughly followed Long’s (2011) classification structure, which included Crime, Abuse of Office,

Financial, Moral, Statement, and “Other” as the major classes of scandal. However, I added additional categories and collapsed the crime category into the other categories.

Furthermore, I find “moral” to be far too broad of a term to be used as a classification for scandal – Long’s definition of morality in this case was only limited to sex scandals, while I will argue in Chapter 4 that a many more types of scandals fall into that category.

Similarly, some events can be both criminal and abuses of office, so having “crime” be its own category is unnecessary. The major categories into which I placed scandals were:

Bribery, Abuse of Office, Sex, Campaign Finance violation, racism/sexism, violence.

Lying, and “unsavory behavior.” The full list of scandals, and the category to which they were assigned, can be found in Appendix C.

DESCRIPTIVE DATA:

First, I offer simple counts of the number of scandals, by year -- both the overall totals and the number of Congressional scandals. Note that the House Bank Scandal of

1992 inflates the total for that year.

COUNT OF SCANDALS 40

Figure 2:1 Count of Scandals, all Officeholders

Congressional Scandals Only

Figure 2:2 Count of Scandals, Congress only

As can be seen in Figures 2:1 and 2:2, the number of scandal included in the database ebbs and flows in a non-linear way. The mid-1980s had a relatively scarce number of scandals, while the mid-1990s (particularly 1992) had comparably a comparably larger number of scandals. The number of scandals dipped between 1999 and 2003, but rose decisively after 2004.

The database contains 489 unique scandal-events -- meaning that one politician can be involved in more than one scandal. 45% of these scandals involved a US

Congressperson. The distribution across all bodies can be seen in Table 2:1.

Office # of Events Percent of Database Governor 52 11% Judge 35 7% Mayor 22 4% State 85 17% House State 72 15% Senate US House 167 34% US Senate 56 11% TOTAL 489 100% Table 2:1 Number of scandal events, by office

Even though there are substantially more state-level politicians than federal, the database was comprised proportionally more of federal office-holders, in large part due to the collection method. Scandals involving a member of Congress are more likely to be picked up by a national newspaper. Those state-level scandals that did make it into the

54 database were often scandals involving a larger number of individuals and often were suffixed with -gate.

Region:

The database contains scandals from every American state except Kansas,

Nebraska, Montana, Vermont and Wyoming. It also includes scandals from Puerto Rico and Washington DC. While it is almost certain that political scandals have occurred in those states during this time period, they lack the national news presence to make it into my database. In any case, their omission does not seem likely to bias the results, nor does it speak to any major problem about the sampling method. Vermont and Wyoming are two of the least-populated states, which could indicate that the sampling method would not pick up scandals from small states, but scandals from Alaska, New Hampshire, New

Mexico, and other small states were collected.

Scandals from the south dominated the database. This is likely caused by the number of large-population states in the South -- Florida, Texas and Georgia are all southern states. Similarly, the "plains" region -- effectively including only the Dakotas and Oklahoma, as Nebraska and Kansas failed to register a single scandal -- includes only small-population states.

Region # of Scandals Percent Mid Atlantic 68 14% Midwest 99 20.3% Mountain 37 7.6% North East 69 14.2% Plains 6 1.2% South 143 29.4% West 65 13.3% TOTAL 487 Table 2:2 Number of scandal events, by State

Again, these data suggest that while the database does not contain a fully-representative collection of scandal, it does not appear to be biased tremendously by sampling method.

The top three states in terms of the number scandal events, New York, California, and

Texas, are also the top three in terms of total population.

Party Split:

One of the most striking, and surprising, findings is the vast proportion of

Democrats to Republicans involved in scandals. Democrats make up 58% of the database, and 65% of all party-coded scandals. Republicans comprise only 32% of the database, and 35% of the party-coded scandals. The full breakdown of party coded data can be seen in Table 2:3.

Office Democrat Republican 25 23 Governor (52%) (48%) 19 2 Mayor (90%) (10%) State 52 28 House (65%) (35%) State 53 14 Senate (79%) (21%) 104 63 US House (62%) (37%) 30 26 US Senate (54%) (46%) 283 156 TOTAL (65%) (35%) Table 2:3 Number of scandal events, by party and office

As we can see from Table 2:3, this finding is largely driven by stark differences between the number of US House and state House and Senate Democrats involved in scandal.

Barely any difference exists for Governors. This finding replicates one from Stewart

(1994), who also found more Democrats involved in scandal.

The difference between the numbers of politicians involved in scandal as a function of party is surprising in how pronounced it is. Further research will shed light on this finding, as well as examine its statistical significance – were there simply more

Democrats holding office in this time period? Although it would be impossible to fully compare the sample selection to the general “politician” population, I will be able to compare these numbers to members of the US House and Senate, for which I do have a complete sample for this time period.

Gender:

Ninety-two percent of the individuals involved in scandal were men. This does seem to support the literature, discussed earlier, showing that women are likely to be more

“ethical” leaders, but as is the case with the party distribution, I will explore this later9.

Gender # of Events 452 Males (92%) 37 Females (8%) Table 2:4: Count of Scandal by Gender

Finally, not all scandal types appeared with the same frequency. This breakdown, as well as the party split among types of scandal, can be seen in Table 2:5, below10.

9 When looking at the gender breakdown across types of scandal, only one type of scandal saw significant differences in the number of women vs. men involved in that scandal type: men were more likely to be involved in sex scandals than were women. 10 I did explore the type of scandal over time, but no temporal trends were apparent. More research would be needed to see whether the content of the scandal changed over the 30 year period in this dissertation – would a sex scandal in 1976 be called a sex scandal in 2010?

Democrats Republicans 98 47 Abuse of Office (66%) (32%) 90 43 Bribery (66%) (32%) 39 24 Sex (62%) (38%) 11 15 Unsavory Behavior (41%) (56%) Campaign 13 9 Violations (59%) (41%) 8 3 Stealing (67%) (25%) 7 4 Lying (64%) (36%) Table 2:5: Scandals by Type and Party

First, here is a clear finding here, and it is that in the universe of events that rise to

“scandal,” abusing one’s position and bribery (for a politician, receiving bribes) are clearly the two events that either occur the most frequently or garner the most attention.

Sex scandals, similarly, make up a healthy chunk of the database. After these three categories, the number of unique scandal events falls precipitously. These numbers are difficult to talk about because of the clear selection bias. To land into the database, an event needs to be publicized, and there are simple reasons why abusing office or taking bribes would be more likely to generate public interest. For one, abusing one’s office is a behavior likely to involve a larger number of people than abusing one’s wife, and with each person involved, the chances that the event will be made public increase.

Furthermore, sex scandals – while salacious – are considered to be the private domain.

From this, I would be hard-pressed to argue that politicians receive bribes more often than they cheat on their spouses, but if they do receive a bribe, it appears much more likely that the event will be called a scandal.

The starkness of the party split here begs further exploration. The only category where Republican misdeeds are more common is the “Unsavory Behavior” category.

They appear substantially less likely to be recipients of bribery (strict partisans would probably say that they’re just less likely to be caught), they are less likely to abuse their office, and they are less likely to get involved in sex scandals. They are, however, more likely to do things like drive drunk or smuggle drugs. Or, it’s simply possible that if they do those things, they are more likely to make it into the papers. Clearly, some modeling is necessary to parse apart these relationships.

ESTIMATION:

My first series of hypotheses concern systematic and individual factors contributing to involvement in a scandal. Some basic tests can help provide support for the systemic factors hypotheses.

Systemic Factor Tests:

My first hypothesis postulated that the number of scandals would be highest in professional legislative environments. For the first test of this hypothesis, I counted the number of state-level scandals in each state for my time period. A variety of conflating factors could also explain state-by-state variation in the number of scandals, so I ran a

Poisson count model to account for some potential noise. The most obvious possible conflating variable for the number of scandals across states is the size of the state

60 legislative body. A state with more representatives is more likely to have more scandals involving state-level politicians. The number of state legislators in the US ranges from

49 in unicameral Nebraska to 424 in New Hampshire. An additional conflating variable relates to my collection method, which relied on newspaper coverage. My selection of newspapers was chosen based on the paper’s national profile, but a side effect of this collection method was that these papers also covered regional scandals for their area. I included a control variable accounting for whether a newspaper was based in the state to account for this collection bias11.

I also included a measure developed by the Center for Public Integrity in 2013 as a means to account for other potential sources of corruption. This measure accounts for overall accountability, the transparency of various state processes (including the budget procurement process, campaign finance laws, lobbying, and redistricting), the presence of and powers granted to state auditors, and public access to government information. It theoretically ranges from 0-100 although the lowest score was 49 (Georgia) and the highest was 87 (New Jersey).12 This score is an imperfect measure of some of the factors that could influence a politician’s likelihood of being involved with scandal. It is a recent measure, and many of the states that score well are ones that have been beset by major corruption problems. They have since implemented reforms to counter this corruption, bringing the scores up. However, it is one of the only comprehensive, cross-state measures that attempts to quantify the state’s corruption potential.

11 I indicated that the Washington Post was a local paper for both Virginia and Maryland. 12 This index can be seen here: http://www.stateintegrity.org/your_state

Finally, the main explanatory variable I included in the model was a 1-5 measure of the professionalization of the state legislature, as developed by the National

Conference on State Legislatures. This measure accounts for whether the legislature is full or part time as well as how much money state legislators make. In states with a very professional legislature, serving as a state representative is a full-time job and this job is well-compensated. In states at the other end of the scale, the legislative calendar is part- time and legislators usually need to take on additional work in order to support themselves. Again, this measure is recent, but less likely to have changed over time, as state legislatures rarely change the factors that influence their professionalism.

I ran a poisson count model, with the number of scandals per state as the dependent variable. I included the variables I discussed above as predictors, and the results are displayed in table 2:6.

Poisson Count Model 0.37*** Professionalization (0.06) 0.63*** Newspaper in State (0.14) 0.00** Size of Legislative Body (0.00) 0.00 Corruption Score (0.01) Table 2:6: Number of state-level scandals per state

The model shows that the professionalism of the legislature was predictive of the number of scandals in the state, even controlling for the size of the legislative body. My

62 selection process did appear to affect the results at the state level. States home to newspapers I used to identify scandals did indeed appear to have more scandals. The corruption score did not appear to be predictive of the number of scandals. Since the corruption score largely taps the extensiveness of the state’s regulatory network, it does not appear that these systems have an effect, either as a deterrent or a mechanism through which scandals become public. The professionalization of the legislature did, however, seem to affect the number of scandals, with more professionalized states having more scandals than less professionalized states. I will discuss the implications of this finding later in this chapter.

If Hypothesis Two, the election competitiveness hypotheses, was supported, I would expect to see increases in the number of scandals during election years. The database covers a period of 36 years, and of those 36 years, 18 were election years. Nine were presidential election years.

Average, Total All Scandals per year Election Year 253 14.1 Non-Election Year 234 13 Congress Only Election Year 137 7.61 Non-Election Year 84 4.67 Table 2:7 Count of Scandals, Election and Non-Election Years

The difference between the mean number of scandals during election and non-election years when including all politicians is not statistically significant (t = -0.35, pr<>0, 0.72).

This provides conditional support that whether or not the year was an election year played no role in the number of reported scandals. The top of Table 2:7 provides preliminary evidence that Hypothesis Two should be rejected.

To provide a further check, I excluded non-Congressional scandals from this same test. Many state-level offices have elections in odd-numbered years (and many have elections in even-numbered years), so it is possible that the “random noise” seen in Table

2:7 is actually made random by the inclusion of scandals affecting individuals who would not be seeking election in even-numbered years. And, indeed, this does appear to be the case. When only including members of Congress, it is apparent that there are fewer scandals in non-election years. The difference between the mean of the number of scandals during election years, compared to non-election years, are statistically significant (t= -1.74, pr <>0 = 0.09). This provides support for Hypothesis Two – electoral competition does appear to be associated with an increase in the number of scandals.

Individual Factor Tests:

The dataset contains scandals involving a variety of officeholders, from county

Judge to US Senator. Since the number of distinct officeholders at all of the levels included in this database is vast, I will focus primarily on the data concerning elected members of Congress, as the number of people who have held office at that level is knowable and quantifiable. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) maintains an extensive database of federal candidates, with uniquely assigned identifiers, back through

1980. This data is collected from the Federal Election Commission and manually

64 standardized by the Center's research staff. CRP also maintains a database of every member of Congress through 1989, also with uniquely assigned identifiers. CRP also adds substantial additional information about each of these people (including campaign finance data, gender, length of time in office, and method of departure). By using CRP’s full candidate database, I will be able to determine whether the pool of members of

Congress involved in scandals is significantly different from an average member of

Congress, accounting for changes in the body’s membership over time.

As I discussed earlier, Democrats far outnumber Republicans in the database of scandals. However, this could simply be because Democrats also outnumber

Republicans in the general politician population. By matching the members of Congress from the scandal data to the full member data, and then running basic Chi Squared difference of means tests, I can determine whether the partisan breakdown in the scandal data is indicative of a predisposition for Democrats to be involved in scandal or whether it is simply an artifact of existing partisan bias in the data itself.

Party Congress, Scandal 1980-2010 Database 584 62 Republicans (46%) (44%)

686 78 Democrats (54%) (56%)

Total 1270 140 Table 2:8 Number of Scandals, by party, compared to US Congress membership

Although there are more Democrats in the scandal database than Republicans, there are also more Democratic members from 1980-2010. A simple Chi Square difference of means shows that Democrats are no more likely to be involved in scandals than

Republicans.

The second problem I face is related to the sample itself. Using the Center for

Responsive Politics data, I find that 1,275 members of Congress have served between

1980 and 2010. Of those 1,275 members, I have only recorded scandals for 140 of them

– roughly 10% of the total population. Despite the prevailing negative attitude about members of Congress, scandals are still rare events, and using traditional logistic regression can lead to problems with estimation (King and Zeng 2001). To this end, I employ the method of rare events logistic regression, which will correct for bias with the maximum likelihood of the estimator.

The resulting equation, which will allow me to test both Hypothesis Three and

Hypothesis Four, therefore, is as follows:

Scandal Likelihood = ß + ß*Gender + ß*Party + ß* Chamber + ß*Region + ß*(logWealth) + ɛ

I test this equation with a rare events logistic regression. My measure of politician wealth, only available for members after 2004, is a combined average of the yearly average of a politician’s held assets, as calculated by the Center for Responsive Politics from reports filed by the members. Results below are corrected logistic regression coefficients and their standard errors.

Model 1 Model 2

0.89*** 0.705*** Chamber (0.27) (0.19) -0.27 0.06 Gender (0.36) (0.25) -0.13 - 0.06 Party (0.16) (0.08) -0.02 Wealth -- (0.06) N 717 1650 * Significant at the 0.10 level, ** Significant at the 0.05 level, *** Significant at the 0.01 level Table 2:9 Rare Events Logistic Regression results for involvement in Scandal

Even accounting for the relative rarity of scandals, gender, party and wealth did not predict a member’s likelihood of being involved in a scandal, failing to support either

Hypothesis Three or Hypothesis Four. The only variable that predicted scandal

67 involvement was the “Chamber” variable, which indicated whether the member was a

Senator or a House member. Senators were significantly more likely to have been involved in scandal, but it is still far too early to say that the Senate itself causes scandal.

Most members of the Senate are more experienced. Many began their careers in the

House. Due to the smaller pool of members, they also may be more closely watched by the media, and therefore more likely to be caught. They also represent larger constituencies, and so more individuals may be interested in their behavior. In any case, this finding begs more research. Certain variables, like time in office or committee membership may matter here, but I do not have that kind of information for every member in the database.

Media Intervention Hypotheses:

Hypothesis Five concerns the role the media play in the production of scandal, particularly as is related to the number of scandals seen over time. A quick examination of Figures 3:1 and 3:2 seems to lend support to Hypothesis Five. The period immediately after the events of September 11th sees a precipitous drop-off in the number of scandals reported. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that that time period curtailed the coverage of at least one major scandal. Gary Condit was embroiled in a scandal involving the disappearance and murder of one of his interns (with whom he had been having an affair) and although he was eventually cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, Horowitz et al

(2008) suggest that coverage of his scandal dropped off after the September 11th attacks, eventually hurting him in his reelection campaign.

Ideally, I would be able to test Hypothesis Five by exploring patterns of coverage at a week-by-week level. Media events, including celebrity deaths, earthquakes, mass shootings happen quickly and the coverage rarely lasts for a prolonged period of time.

Exceptions to this are rare; the OJ Simpson trial is one example. My data is not coded to this level of detail, however. I have a rough estimate of when the scandal first appeared in the database, but this is not a perfect representation of the media coverage it may have received in other media outlets. To this end, I employ a very simple test of Hypothesis

Five, with the understanding that further research will be necessary to fully understand the dynamics of the media and scandal coverage.

One of the noticeable features of Figures 2:1 and 2:2 is the precipitous decline in scandal coverage after September 11th, 2001. This event was a major news event in the

US, and was followed by over a decade of active combat by US soldiers in Iraq and

Afghanistan. The media’s attention may have turned from domestic issues to foreign policy and war coverage. To this end, I employ a simple poisson count model to explore whether the number of scandals varies as a function of the US’s involvement in war. The results of this model are displayed in Table 2:10.

All Congress Scandals Scandals Only

0.44*** 0.09 War (0.10) (0.16) 0.11 0.49*** Election Year (0.10) (0.14) Divided -0.31*** -0.37** Congress (0.11) (0.16) * Indicates significance at the 0.10 level, ** indicates significance at the 0.05 level, *** indicates significance at the 0.01 level

Table 2:10 Poisson Count model of determinants of the number of scandals, per year

The US's involvement in war was only predictive of scandal involvement for all scandals, and it was predictive counter to expectations -- that is, when the US was involved in a war, the number of scandals actually increased, but only at the state level. I included a measure for whether it was a Congressional election year as a control, and it was predictive of the number of scandals for those scandals involving members of Congress, as expected. Finally, I included a variable for whether Congress was experiencing a divided Congress. This was actually negatively associated with the overall number of scandals in both cases, seeming to imply that during times of gridlock, the number of scandals decreases. This runs counter to expectations and provides a caution for accepting Hypothesis Two as well. This finding also seems to disagree with Nyhan's definition of scandal as being a coproduction of media and the opposition party.

DISCUSSION:

I find support for my first and second hypotheses, no support for my third and fourth, and do not provide a definitive test for my fifth. Hypothesis One, which postulates that scandals are more likely to occur in professionalized settings, did find support. Compelling logic might suggest that we should reject Hypothesis One – in professionalized settings, members are well-compensated and might not need to engage in scandal to further build their power. On the other hand, in professionalized settings there may be more media focus on the legislative body, thereby leading to more scandal.

Similarly, legislators hold more power in these settings, and this may provide members with more opportunities to abuse that power. The mechanism explaining the support for

Hypothesis One is not clear, and should be better explored in follow-up research.

Although my data do not provide me with completely a definitive test of my second Hypothesis, they provide conflicting evidence. My tests for the overall number of scandals during election and nonelection years did seem to provide evidence that the number of scandals increases during times of competition. However, even for

Congressional scandals, the presence of divided government actually decreased the number of scandals, implying that when politics is competitive and every seat matters, the number of scandals actually decreases. There are a variety of potential explanations for the finding that the number of scandals increases during election years. The most obvious explanation for this is that when a candidate is running for reelection, the opposition party has motives to make any scandalous behavior public, particularly behaviors which might not be severe enough to result in expulsion but might deter the

71 politician from seeking reelection. However, a competing explanation for the increase in scandals during election years is that the media may be paying closer attention to politicians. What might be small, unreported gaffes during the off-season become news stories during the election season. A more thorough review of the method of departure during election years versus nonelection years could help shed light on this – if politicians are more likely to resign during election years than during non-election years, then perhaps this could be indicative of forced resignation by losing.

The data did not support Hypotheses Three or Four. Women, although forming a minority of the overall dataset, were not statistically less likely than men to become involved in scandal. This finding seems to run counter to much of the work on gender and corruption and supports Sung's (2003) finding that women are not more likely to behave “virtuously” in public office. To some extent, the number of female politicians involved in scandal is too small to see whether they differ from men in the type of scandals they become involved in. Simply put, even though there is not fully definitive evidence that women are just as “corruptible” as men, my findings do suggest that women are no less likely to be scandal-free than men – at least when it comes to holding public office. Perhaps the type of woman who wins a seat in Congress differs from the average woman – or even from the average candidate -- so these findings may not hold outside of the Congressional realm.

Hypothesis Four was also rejected. Those members with higher levels of wealth were no less likely to become involved in scandal than those who were poorer, even when only limiting the scandals to non-sex scandals (which presumably do not have the

72 expectation of increasing wealth). This finding suggests that the motivations behind involvement in scandal do not stem from a desire to increase ones’ own wealth, although there may not be enough evidence to make that claim at this point. Furthermore, the support for Hypothesis One, indicating that scandals are more common in professionalized settings, also supports the null hypothesis here. One of the major differences between a professionalized legislature and a nonprofessional legislature is that members in the former are well compensated.

My failure to reject the null hypotheses for either of the two individual-difference hypotheses suggests that a “scandal-prone” politician type may not exist. Partisanship, wealth, gender – none of the traditional variables associated with various political behaviors – allowed for differentiation between those Congress members who were tarred with scandals and those who have managed to live out their Congressional careers free of scandal. However, I am unable to measure what may be the most persuasive individual differences of all: a politician’s level of personal ethics and a politician’s personality. Although literature suggests that female politicians may have lower levels of political ambition (and aggression) than their male counterparts, gender is also a poor proxy for that variable here. Furthermore, it is likely that all members of Congress have high levels of ambition, although there is also almost certainly variation there. A thirst for power – however immeasurable that is – may ultimately be the great “corrupter.” If politicians are, as a group, higher than the average citizen in this trait, it may simply be the case that those individuals who are best suited to run a clean government are those who do not seek that power.

One of the more surprising findings was that members in the Senate were statistically more likely to be involved in scandals when compared to their counterparts in the House. A number of factors could explain this. Senators have higher profiles than most House members, and the media could thereby might pay more attention to their behaviors. Any individual Senator is also more powerful than any individual House member, and so access to power might result in more opportunities to abuse that power.

If “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” then we would be more likely to see more corruption – and therefore more scandals – around more powerful individuals.

The support for Hypothesis One, as well as the finding that members of the

Senate are more likely to be involved in scandal than their House counterparts, both seem to bolster the argument that more powerful positions are more likely to be associated with scandal. The causal mechanism for why this happens is unclear – do higher profile individuals attract more media attention, increasing the likelihood than any scandalous behaviors eventually get “caught?” Or, do they have more access to power, which means they also have more opportunities to abuse that power? Or, an alternative I have not discussed could just be that the individuals who are attracted to higher-profile jobs are the same individuals who might be more inclined to engage in corrupt behaviors. The type of people who become senators or presidents may simply be different than the type of people who become representatives. A legislator from New Hampshire may have a very different set of goals than a legislator in a more professionalized legislature. Further research would be necessary to parse out some of the mechanisms explaining these findings.

Although I was not able to explore the effects of media coverage as thoroughly as

I wanted, I did find a small amount of evidence that media coverage of scandal may not be as sensitive to media famine as we expect. Given the inadequacies of measurement, however, I would hesitate to reject this hypothesis as fully as would be ideal. The US has been involved in foreign conflicts almost constantly during the period of time measured by my database, but has only been involved in a prolonged conflict during the early

1990s and most of the first decade of the 21st century.

Fundamentally, it appears clear that the media plays a major role in the construction of scandal. My tests rely heavily on the media’s role in scandal; to even land in my dataset, the scandal needed to be discussed in a major news outlet. Similarly, my explanations for why I find support for the two situational hypotheses also provide a role for media involvement -- professionalized legislatures attract more media attention, and the media are paying more attention to politics when elections are near.

Unfortunately, I do not have sufficient data to further test or provide support for these two mechanistic explanations.

CHAPTER 3: SURVIVAL OF SCANDAL

In the previous chapter, I discussed a politician’s likelihood of becoming involved in scandal and found that very few variables reliably predict scandal involvement.

Members of Congress who become involved in scandals do not seem to be different from those who do not – even though the pool of politicians who are involved in scandal appears to be predominantly made up of male, white Democrats, this does not differ significantly from the male, white, Democratic US Congress. However, Senators are more likely to become involved in scandals, and scandals are more likely to develop during times of media famine. In this chapter, I will focus on the factors that affect the progression of the final phase of the scandal, survival. I define survival conservatively, as any result where the officeholder does not survive the election immediately following the scandal. Cases of resignation, impeachment, or defeat are classified as the member not surviving the scandal.

This phase speaks to some of the most interesting characteristics of scandal, as two quick cases will demonstrate. David Vitter and Larry Craig, both white Republicans, have both been involved in sex scandals in the early 21st century. Vitter, a current US

Senator, was linked to a prostitution service in 2007 when his phone number was found in the phonebook of the “DC Madame,” Deborah Jeanne Palfrey. He apologized, with his wife by his side, a week after these allegations were made public and was offered

“forgiveness” by the national Republican Party. At the time the scandal was made public, the Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, was a Democrat and she would have been able to appoint Vitter’s successor were he to step down. The simple explanation for

Vitter’s survival in this case seems to be that it was in the best interest of the party for him to remain in office at the time, but he did go on to win his reelection campaign in

2010 so even if the Republican Party was implicit in his immediate survival, the voters found it in their hearts to forgive him as well.

Larry Craig presents a very different case. Craig, a Republican from Idaho, had served in the US Congress for 27 years when he was arrested for “lewd conduct” in a

Minneapolis airport. As the details of the arrest became public, Craig was found to have been attempting to solicit an undercover male police officer for sexual activity. This garnered quick media attention and although Craig denied the allegations (also with his wife by his side), he announced his resignation. He eventually served out the remainder of his term and did not run for reelection.

On the surface, Craig and Vitter offer similar cases. They are both white, conservative, married Senators. Their scandals broke in the same year. But, while Vitter was forgiven by the national Republican Party, Craig was offered no such forgiveness.

Vitter’s crime was unable to be prosecuted, while Craig’s was. He pleaded guilty to

“disorderly conduct,” which he later regretted. Both represented conservative states, but the scandals differ in two major ways: the Democrats were in power in Louisiana, but not

Louisiana, and Vitter was involved in a heterosexual sex scandal, while Craig was

77 involved in a homosexual sex scandal. Craig, long an opponent of same-sex marriage, was labeled a hypocrite, whereas no such label was attached to Vitter.

As is clear here, even though both scandals share surface-level similarities, the places they differ involve the partisan context in which they occurred as well as the content of the scandal itself. As I will argue, surviving scandal, the final phase in my five phases of scandal, draws from and speaks to many concepts in political science.

Survival or defeat can be seen as a consequence of public opinion and the voting behavior of a politician’s constituents, but it also speaks to larger themes about American values. Why might Americans be more likely to forgive Mark Sanford or Bill Clinton than Richard Nixon or Larry Craig? Do characteristics of the politician, like her effectiveness in Congress, likeability, race and gender affect her likelihood of surviving a scandal, or does the “scandalous action” itself affect a politician’s likelihood of surviving it? Or, is survival a more complex interaction between the politician’s personal characteristics, the characteristics of the electorate, and the content of the scandal itself?

Why can David Vitter survive his sex scandal when Larry Craig cannot? I will explore these questions in this chapter.

Conceptualizing Survival

Winning and losing an election is more complex than simply defeating or being defeated by an opposition candidate. Office holders can be -- and in these cases, frequently are -- forcibly removed from office through expulsion. They might also resign, either for reasons unrelated to the scandal or because they are worried about their likelihood of winning their next elections. Politicians can be defeated in primaries or

78 general elections, and the differences here may be significant. A primary-election defeat could plausibly mean that the politician represents a one-party district or that the scandal he was involved in bothered his co-partisans. An election defeat of any sort might be a direct consequence of the politician's involvement in a scandal, but the politician could have lost for a variety of other reasons as well.

LITERATURE REVIEW

In this final phase of a scandal event, four major elements are involved in the survival of any given scandal: the politician himself, his constituents, the actual details of the scandal itself and the role the media play in covering the scandal events. The media enters the scandal event in Phase 3 (or, if they are involved in the cover-up, at the tail end of Phase 2) but from then on shapes the way constituents evaluate the scandal, and so media effects are present throughout the entirety of the survival phase.

Recently, a small number of articles have examined the effect of scandal on political survival, particularly among US House members. Long (2011) studied the effect of scandal on survival of US Senators from 1974-2008, and Basinger looked at the effect of scandal on political survival of US House members (2013). Basinger’s work is most relevant to my work, as he also constructed a database of political scandals.

Basinger included all cases of US House Members who dealt with ethics challenges. Both of these scholars found that even though politicians might "survive" their scandal, they do lose votes at the polling booth. Basinger recorded a 6.5 point drop at the polls for politicians involved in scandal. However, elections are only one stage in the survival process. More work is necessary to explore the many ways scandal can influence a

79 politician's future. Much as is also the case for whether or not a politician gets involved in scandal at all, political psychology research suggests that factors that might contribute to survival likelihood include both situational and individual factors.

Individual Characteristics:

Some politicians may just be able to talk themselves out of scandal. Certain elements of charisma, the strength of the politician's record, and other (to some extent immeasurable) traits may lead to the politician being more likely to survive any hot-water situation he may find himself in.

Carolyn Funk’s work on evaluations of scandal-tainted politicians is perhaps the most significant contribution to the candidate-centered literature on scandals. She examined individual evaluations of hypothetical politicians involved in experimentally constructed scandals, and found that those politicians who had been involved in scandals which negatively affected assessments of their competence were treated more harshly by the experiment’s participants. Those politicians who were involved in scandals which affected their perceived “warmth” were less likely to be punished (Funk 1996). To some degree, these findings speak more to the factors of the scandal itself and less to politician traits, although politicians who are demonstrably more competent prior to the scandal could have an advantage when the scandal happens.

Others have also found that those candidates who have higher levels of “quality” are more likely to serve in Congress for longer, as those who are weaker are more likely to lose re-election or voluntarily leave office (Mondak 1995). Being involved in scandal,

80 as Funk found, can influence voter perception of a Congress member’s competence

(Funk 1996), which can serve as a heuristic for general candidate quality.

Several actual scandals can add context to these discussions. Former president

Bill Clinton famously “survived” his (numerous) scandals, the most famous of which involved his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In spite of massive amounts of press coverage, as well as relatively solid evidence that he was guilty of those actions of which he was accused, Clinton completed his term even after being impeached. His popularity remained high, and as Fischle (2000) points out, actually increased after the scandal.

Fischle (2000) attributed Clinton’s success to motivated reasoning on the part of the

American public – those individuals who voted for and supported Clinton were less likely to believe that the allegations were credible, less likely to find them to be important, and were thusly less likely to call for his resignation. Clinton, however, was a highly-visible

President; it is less likely that voters might expend the psychological resources to continue their support for their local state representative if they are even aware of the scandal. They might not have enough information about the scandal and could vote for or against them without any of this knowledge.

Other traits can also affect the way a politician is treated by the media during scandal. Niven (2004) found that minorities and women involved in the House Bank

Scandal were more likely to be portrayed negatively by the media than were whites or men. Niven attributed this finding to the fact that women and minorities are relatively rare in US elected office, so their abnormality automatically makes them more newsworthy.

Other politician characteristics that could lead to more of a "buffer" in the case a scandal does strike, including incumbency. The advantages brought by incumbency are numerous. Incumbents have larger war chests, more impressive legislative portfolios, and greater name recognition with the voting public, as well as the fact that quality challengers are less likely to run against incumbents than they are to seek open seats (Cox and Katz 1996, Cover 1977, Levitt and Wolfram 1997, Prior 2006, Shaffner 2006).

While scandals have been shown as not adequate to topple politicians in the electoral arena, a politician running for election after a scandal should expect to lose 6.5 points in their reelection bid (Long 2011). Recent work also supports the claim that US House members from safer seats (as measured by the percent of vote share the politician received in the election prior to the election) are more likely to deter quality challengers

(Basinger 2013).

Situational Factors:

The politics of the times may very well affect the politician's survival of scandal.

As the Craig/Vitter example suggests, Vitter (a Republican) would have lost his seat and

Democrat Kathleen Blanco would have replaced him. Craig, however, would have been replaced by a fellow Republican. This context may have been important for their ultimate decision of whether to resign, or just seek their fates with the electorate.

A fair amount of work has been completed examining the effects of scandal on constituent evaluations of politicians, although this has not always been discussed in those terms. The House Bank Scandal offered scholars a unique opportunity to view

82 scandals as “natural” experiments, as a large number of individuals were tainted by the scandal but the outcomes of their involvement varied.

The House Bank Scandal, which occurred between 1990 and 1992, and became public information in 1992 involved 450 Congress members. These members took advantage of a provision which allowed them to legally overdraft their House Bank accounts without penalty as long as the amount of their overdraft was not larger than the amount of their next paycheck. Of these 450 members, 22 were singled out by the House

Ethics committee for greater levels of abuse – in this case, leaving their accounts overdrawn for more than 8 months.

The House Bank Scandal is a useful event for study because of the number of individuals involved, the easily-measurable variation on the level of their involvement

(by simple logic, a member can be considered more involved if they over-drafted a higher number of checks), and the variation on the outcome. However, the event does have limitations for study as well. Most obviously, it is only one example of scandal, occurring in a specific historical context with a specific set of actors. The “Gang of

Seven,” a group of younger and newer House Republicans (whose membership included

Newt Gingrich and Eric Cantor, among others) actively pursued and highlighted the scandal. Gingrich, who himself had over-drafted his account, assumed that Democrats would be more hurt by the scandal than Republicans, as far more Democrats had been involved. In fact, of the 22 members investigated by the House Ethics Committee, only one was a Republican. In this case, the political motives of some members of the House

83 were instrumental in driving a scandal forward, which support’s Nyhan’s argument that a scandal is a coproduction between the media and the opposition party.

In some ways because of the particularities of the House Bank Scandal, it also serves as a useful illustration for the ways scandal survival can be influenced by a variety of factors. As Gingrich perhaps expected, elderly members of Congress were more likely to retire in the 1992 elections, directly as a consequence of their involvement in the scandal (Groseclose and Krehbiel 1994). Those members who did seek reelection were hit with a five point reduction in their vote percentage in the 1992 elections (Dimock and

Jacobsen 1995). In this case, members generally followed one of two routes – they either retired or lost. However, even in the 1992 election, 88% of those incumbents who ran were reelected – low, by that body’s standards, but certainly still a high percentage.

HYPOTHESES:

Incumbency advantage is one of the most robust phenomena in political science.

Incumbents have larger war chests, deter higher-quality challengers, and have greater name recognition with the voting public. As my database only includes people who have been elected, I will not be able to differentiate between incumbents and non-incumbents, but I can measure the length of time a politician has held their office. In this way, I can capture those factors with which incumbency advantage is associated, like size of war chest, even though every politician is an incumbent. Given this, I hypothesize that those politicians who have been in office longer will be more likely to survive their scandals.

Hypothesis One: The length of time a politician has held office is positively

related to the politician’s likelihood of surviving their scandal.

As the Vitter/Craig example suggests, the person who can replace the member, were he or she to resign, can be either a Republican or a Democrat (or, in rare cases, neither). This means that if the politician were to resign because of scandal, they could effectively be hurting their own party. Similarly, the party itself might have incentives to minimize a scandal (or vice versa) given the presence of a copartsisan in the Governorship. This suggests Hypothesis Two:

Hypothesis Two: Politicians will be less likely to resign from office if the person

who can replace them shares their party.

The type of scandal in which the politician engages is, to some extent, both situational and an individual characteristic. Politicians who become involved in sex scandals may be different than politicians who become involved in bribery scandals. Similarly, one common type of scandal -- which cuts across the classifications I discussed in the previous chapter -- is a scandal where the politician was actively engaged in campaigning. Peters and Welch (1978) find that cases of corruption involving campaign violations, while common, are seen as less corrupt than other types of violations. Later, they found that while Democrats were hurt by campaign violations, Republicans were not

(Peters and Welch 1980). The effect of campaign violations on a politician’s survival is somewhat counter-intuitive – on the one hand, the proximity of the scandal to the election could plausibly hurt the member more than a scandal farther from the election, but on the other hand, “politics is dirty business.”

Hypothesis Three: Politicians involved in scandals during their campaigns will

be more likely to survive these scandals.

Finally, individual characteristics of the politician may contribute to scandal survival as well, and in unexpected ways. As Meier and Holbrook (1992) found, minorities are more likely to be punished by the media for their scandals.

Hypothesis Four: Minority politicians will be less likely than white politicians to

survive their scandals.

DATA

I have discussed the creation of the database in Chapter Two and will not do so here, again. A full list of coded variables can be found in Appendix B. For the purposes of this chapter, I will discuss those variables potentially related to survival that I coded after doing research into the details of the scandal.

Survival Outcomes: A politician’s fate after scandal is not always as simple as “win” or

“loss.” Many politicians are forced from office by law, term limits, or even death. After extensive coding, I identified the most common “routes” out of office. These are displayed in Table 3:1.

OUTCOME Count Survival? Did not run 80 Died 3 Expelled 29 Jail 2 Lost election: Primary 34 General 56 Unknown 12 Resigned 128 Still in Office 22 Y Term Limited 10 Won Reelection 85 Y Other 31 Table 3:1 Counts of Scandal Outcomes

Resignation was the most common outcome of scandal. The second most common losing reelection, followed by winning reelection. Willingly choosing not to run was another common outcome. Of the outcomes, only two indicate “survival” by my coding rules.

Although resigning and losing have different motivations, the outcome is essentially the same: the politician no longer holds office.

Time after entering office:

Although I was not able to isolate the specific date on which these scandals took place, I could usually identify the year in which they took place. This information allowed me to create a rough variable of how long the politician had held office before becoming embroiled in scandal. The range on this variable (for known values – in some

87 cases I was not able to identify the year in which the scandal occurred) was from -113 to

4714. The mean of this variable was slightly longer than 11 years, and the median was 10 years.

Replacement results in party shift

In order to explore the politician's resignation likelihood given the politician in power, I needed to determine the party in charge of replacing US Congress members during the year the scandal took place. In several states, the member is replaced by election -- no one replaces them, even temporarily. Any scandals involving US Congress members from these states (Alaska, Oregon, and Wisconsin) were all coded as being in a position where their resignation would not result in a different partisan taking control of their seat. In several other states (Arizona, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming) the

Governor is required to choose a replacement of the same party as the resigning member.

In all other states, the Governor can appoint whomever she wants; to code this variable I relied on the assumption that the Governor would appoint a replacement from her own party.

RESULTS

To test my first hypothesis, I need to establish whether a relationship exists between a politician’s seniority in office and their ability to “survive” the scandal. As can be seen in Figure 5:1, more senior politicians do appear to have slightly higher

13 In some cases, politicians were hit by scandal before they even took office but after they were elected. 14 BB “Sixty” Rayburn, a state Senator from Louisiana, held office from 1948 until 1991.

88 likelihoods of surviving their scandal, when all possible outcomes for scandal are included.

Percent Surivival, All Politicians 1 0.9

0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4

0.3 Percent Survived Percent 0.2 0.1 0 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 Seniority in years

Figure 3:1 Survival Percent by Time in Office

The trend line in Figure 3:1 shows a slight increase from an 18% likelihood of survival when the politician was elected only one or two years before the scandal and a 37% likelihood when they have held office for more than 30 years.

However, assuming that the politician’s likelihood of survival would be consistent regardless of their involvement in scandal is also flawed. Those politicians who have been involved in politics for more than 30 years are more likely to retire regardless of their involvement in scandal. And, although more senior politicians might feasibly resign for exactly the same reasons as less-senior politicians, their likelihood of retiring because

89 of age is higher. When accounting for this, the trend is similar, but slightly less pronounced, as can be seen in Figure 3:2.

Percent Survived, Election survival only 0.8 0.7

0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3

PercentSurvived 0.2 0.1 0 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 Seniority in years

Figure 3:2 Survival Percent for Reelection campaigns, by Seniority

ESTIMATION

Although Figures 3:1 and 3:2 provide conditional support for Hypothesis One, further modeling is required to support the Hypothesis. I rely on my definition of scandal survival to analyze which factors affected a politician’s likelihood of surviving scandal. The basic model includes both individual-specific factors and context-specific factors. I estimate that a politician’s likelihood of surviving a scandal is affected by:

Individual Factors:

1) Seniority. As everyone in the database is an incumbent at the time of the scandal,

this variable measures the politician’s seniority, which might also represent the

familiarity he has with his district, the safety of his seat, and other factors which

could influence his likelihood of surviving the scandal.

2) Gender: I do not expect that gender will have a substantive or significant impact

on the politician’s likelihood of surviving the scandal, but it is possible that

certain behaviors could be forgiven for women, but not men, or vice versa. Smith

et al. 2005 find that women are not punished more severely for misdeeds in office,

but they also find that women do more harshly evaluate politicians, regardless of

their gender or the content of the scandal (2005).

3) Race: As I hypothesized in Hypothesis Four, minorities may be more negatively

evaluated by their constituents than white politicians. This variable is coded

minority or white.

Situational Factors

1) State or Federal Office: The previous chapter found that members who held

Senate positions were more likely to become involved in scandal. As I discussed

in that Chapter, I believe that serving in the Senate is actually a proxy for holding

office for longer, which will be captured with the “Seniority” variable, but there

may be other reasons why office holding could be related to surviving the scandal.

All things being equal, US House members have a higher likelihood of being

reelected than Senate members. However, the difference between State and

Federal members is an important one – Congress members tend to have more

name recognition than their state-level counterparts, and so the dynamics of

scandal might be altered by their greater levels of publicity.

2) Campaign situation: As I hypothesized in Hypothesis Three, I believe that

politicians who are engaged in scandals relating to their campaign activities will

be evaluated less harshly than those who are not. Even though a campaign

scandal may occur in closer proximity to an election, campaigns are “dirty

business” and voters may be quicker to forgive politicians for their transactions

when they believe the misdeed is “all in the game.”

3) Type of Scandal: In these models, I included each type of scandal with more than

10 occurrences in the database as a dummy variable.

4) Shared partisanship: For members of Congress, the decision to resign could

possibly be affected by the individual who is likely to replace him. I included a

measure of whether the resignation would result in the partisanship of the seat

switching.

To test the Hypotheses, I employed a standard logistic regression. First, I constructed eight models using only the scandals involving members of Congress. For the first four models, the dependent variable was overall survival (with survival values being the same as displayed in Table 3:1), and for the second set of models, I only included scandals where the politician either resigned or ran for reelection. Resignation was assigned a value of 1. I included party, race, gender, and seniority as individual-difference measures in the first models, but given the small number of women in the dataset, I excluded gender from the second set of models. I also included the measure of whether the scandal took place during a campaign, as well as the measure of whether the politician's resignation would result in a party shift. Finally, I included the three most common types

92 of scandals to explore whether the scandal-type itself had any impact on survival. The results of these tests are shown in Table 3:2. Standard errors are in parentheses.

All Survival Outcomes Resignation or Election Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 -0.41 -0.41 -0.41 -0.44 0.38 0.30 0.37 0.34 Party (0.36) (0.36) (0.37) (0.36) (0.46) (0.48) (0.47) (0.47) -0.28 -0.27 -0.25 -0.27 0.31 0.11 0.25 0.34 Race (0.42) (0.42) (0.43) (0.42) (0.63) (0.64) (0.63) (0.62) -0.28 -0.35 -0.42 -0.42

Gender (0.42) (0.57) (0.58) (0.58) 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.03 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 Seniority (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) Campaign 0.34* 0.34* 0.37* 0.33 -0.59 -0.44 -0.61* -0.59* (0.21) (0.21) (0.21) (0.21) (0.37) (0.37) (0.37) (0.36)

0.49 0.49 0.53 0.54 -0.36 -0.44 -0.40 -0.33 Shared Party (0.33) (0.33) (0.4) (0.330 (0.45) (0.48) (0.46) (0.46) -0.01 1.37***

Sex Scandal (0.47) (0.50) 0.52 -0.54

Bribery (0.39) (0.55) -0.37 -0.68

Abuse (0.36) (0.52) 180 180 180 180 160 160 160 160 N:

Gender was dropped from the resignation/election tests because of the small number of women. *** indicates significance at the 0.00 level, ** indicates significance at the 0.05 level, * indicates significance at the 0.1 level Table 3:2 Logistic Regression of Survival

Table 3:2 shows that the only consistent significant predictor of survival was the indicator of whether or not the politician was involved in a scandal that involved his campaign. Partisan concerns about whether resignation would result in party shift did not appear to result in a greater likelihood of survival, as was hypothesized. Seniority was not associated with a greater likelihood of surviving the scandal, all things being equal, for members of Congress, contrary to the findings earlier this chapter.

Interestingly, being involved in a sex scandal predicted resignation, even though no other scandal type predicted resignation. The implications of this finding will be discussed later.

The findings in Table 3:2 fail to reject the null hypotheses for Hypotheses One,

Two, and Four. They do support Hypothesis Three.

I also ran similar logistic regressions for the entire sample pool. In this case, I did not include the "shared partisanship" variable, as I only coded that variable for members of Congress. I also included a variable that accounted for whether the politician was a state- or federal-level actor. The results of these models are shown in Table 3:3.

All Survival Outcomes Resign or face Elections Model Model Model 1 Model 4 Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 2 3 -0.38 -0.41 -0.39 -0.41 0.53* 0.52* 0.53* 0.47 Party (0.28) (0.29) (0.29) (0.29) (0.30) (0.30) (0.30) (0.30) -0.18 -0.15 -0.14 -0.13 -0.12 -0.15 -0.12 -0.10 Race (0.32) (0.32) (0.32) (0.32) (0.35) (0.36) (0.35) (0.35) -0.31 -0.36 0.64 -0.10 -0.21 -0.10 -0.20 Gender (0.44) (0.44) (0.27) (0.49) (0.49) (0.49) (0.50) 0.63** 0.62** 0.62** -0.35** -1.08*** -1.10*** -1.07*** -1.03*** Level (0.27) (0.27) (0.27) (0.44) (0.29) (0.29) (0.29) (0.29) 0.03** 0.03** -0.31** 0.03** 0.01 0.02 0.01 0.01

6 Seniority (0.02) (0.01) (0.44) (0.01) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02)

0.41** 0.43*** 0.03** 0.40** -0.08 -0.02 -0.08 -0.09 Campaign (0.16) (0.17) (0.01) (0.16) (0.20) (0.2) (0.21) (0.21) 0.41 0.69**

Sex Scandal (0.36) (0.35) 0.01 0.01

Bribery (0.30) (0.31) -0.20 -0.53* Abuse (0.28) (0.32) N 337 337 337 337 243 243 243 243 *** indicates significance at the 0.00 level, ** indicates significance at the 0.05 level, * indicates significance at the 0.1 level

Table 3:3 Logistic Regression Models predicting scandal survival 96

The results in Table 3:3 largely mirror the results from Table 3:2, to a large extent.

However, in this case, seniority did predict survival of scandal (but not the choice to resign), which provides support for Hypothesis One. Furthermore, in this model it becomes clear that those members in Congress are actually more likely to survive their scandals over-all, which could explain why seniority was a significant predictor of survival in this model, but not in the earlier data: a smaller sample and less variance on the outcome would make finding significant predictors more difficult. In this case, being involved in a sex scandal was not more likely to lead to not surviving, but again, it was more likely to lead to resignation. Interestingly, abusing one's office was more likely to lead to choosing to seek reelection. For the second set of models in Table 3:3, we can also see that Republicans are more likely to resign, while Democrats are more likely to seek reelection. Finally, partisanship mattered in the overall pool -- Republicans were more likely to resign, while Democrats were more likely to face reelection. A variety of explanations can speak to that finding, but I will discuss this unexpected finding later in this chapter.

DISCUSSION

The results generally support Hypothesis Three, but fail to support Hypotheses

Four and Hypothesis Two. Campaign-centric violations have less severe consequences than those that do not involve campaigns, but minorities are no more or less likely to survive their scandals than are white politicians, and concerns about one's seat switching parties also did not seem to matter. The evidence for Hypothesis One is mixed. All things considered, for the entire pool of scandals, those politicians who have held office

97 for longer are more likely to remain in office following a scandal. They are not, however, more likely to resign. This could be explained by a variety of reasons: more senior politicians have a larger war chest, they represent safer seats, they have more name recognition with their constituents than do their eventual challengers, and so on. As

Fischle (2000) found, Clinton voters were less likely to see the Lewinsky scandal as important and less likely to view the Lewinsky allegations as credible. Although I do not have that level of information about every scandal in this database, it does seem as though voters who will have more familiarity with a politician who they have likely supported prior to the scandal will be likely to behave like Clinton supporters.

The mixed support for Hypothesis One would suggest that seniority has a weaker effect on scandal outcome than might be expected. In fact, the only place seniority mattered was in the overall models for the entire sample -- more senior politicians are no more likely to resign than less senior politicians, and more senior members of Congress are no more likely to survive when compared to their less senior counterparts. This suggests that my models might not be accounting for other possible determinants of survival, like the politician's re-election likelihood were he not involved in scandal.

Basinger (2013) and Long (2011) have both studied election outcomes after scandal, and found that vote percentages usually decrease by about 6.5%. In all likelihood, if their findings hold, the decision to run again may actually be affected by both the politician's own assessment of his reelection likelihood given the political composition of his district, his age, and the magnitude of the scandal itself.

I did include scandal type as a predictor in my models, but I did not code scandals for their overall "severity." Doing so would be challenging, and would likely be done most efficiently by assessing individual responses to a list of real-world scandals. Sex scandals did seem to affect survival likelihood. Politicians were more likely to resign if they were involved in a sex scandal than if they were involved in another type of scandal.

The implications of this finding are complicated, and the explanations for it numerous.

Politicians involved in sex scandals may be pressured by their spouses to resign. They may feel ashamed or embarrassed, and fear what the scandal would do for their credibility. Sex scandals can also be difficult to refute, particularly if there is visual or physical evidence. The public also has a clear understanding of what a sex scandal actually is, while some financial or abuse of office scandals may be more complex and confusing. Regardless, even though sex scandals may be the least "damaging" to government, they are the scandals that may be the least easy to survive (assuming the politician isn't thrown in jail).

One unexpected finding was that in the overall pool of scandals, Democrats were more likely to seek reelection (vis a vis resigning) than were Republicans. A number of explanations could account for this. Democrats might represent safer seats, generally, when compared to Republicans. At the Congressional level in 2013, that does appear to be true (according to the Cook Political Report15. Further research is necessary to explore these more complex dynamics.

15 Cookpolitical.com

To return to the original example of Larry Craig and David Vitter, the explanation

I offered may have been true in that particular case (although it would be difficult to tell), but it does not appear to be true generally. One of the other major differences between the two examples was that Vitter was involved in a heterosexual sex scandal, while Craig was not. It is plausible, probable even, that this difference may have contributed to the different outcomes. This begs the question: not all voters find homosexuality objectionable, but some do. Perhaps different scandals violate different norms for different individuals. I will explore this question in greater detail in the Chapter Five.

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CHAPTER 4: SCANDALS AND MORALITY

Public evaluations play a critical role in the progression of a scandal. The public are ever present actors; even when members of the public are not actively evaluating the politician involved, their presence is one which affects the politician’s behavior. Also critically, they – often – vote to determine the politician’s fate, and their collective forgiveness could lead to the politician making a comeback, as was seen recently by US

Congressman Mark Sanford. Given their important role for the duration of the scandal, the fourth phase of the scandal – active citizen evaluation – can radically alter the outcome of the scandal. In this chapter, I pivot to the fourth phase of scandal, and will describe how evaluations of scandals vary as a function of individual conceptions of morality.

I am interested in the impressions and evaluations individuals form when learning of a political scandal. Do scandals negatively influence public evaluations of the politician, and if so, why might individuals be more inclined to forgive or ignore the misdeed? As Zaller (1998) showed, voters did not condemn President Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky; instead, Clinton’s popularity increased. Whether these positive evaluations were a result of other factors of Clinton’s presidency, including a robust economy, remains an open question. It is also possible that some people were simply not bothered by his actions. Clearly, many factors can help explain the evaluation

101 process, but no scholars have fully integrated whether the individual’s sense of “right and wrong” can be a meaningful predictor of candidate assessment after scandal. Here, I will connect political scandals to moral foundations theory, and will construct situations where experimental participants evaluate hypothetical politicians involved in scandal.

In this chapter, I will argue that scandals can contain an implicit moral component, and that this moral component is evaluated differently by different types of individuals. Some people may view homosexuality itself as immoral. But to others, who may accept homosexuality, deception is immoral. A politician who lies about a homosexual affair may be immoral to both of those sets of people, but for different reasons. And, regardless of these differences in evaluations of morality, voters may agree that some behaviors merit the politician resigning from office while others should result in a slap on the wrist.

I will discuss some of the literature relevant to this complex topic, beginning with a review of the work on morality and whether scandals can be conceptualized in moral terms. I will also draw on the burgeoning literature on moral psychology, particularly as this literature has been applied to other political phenomena, and I will finally discuss the implications this work has for the way we understand political evaluation.

Are scandals moral infractions?

Scholars and clergy have been struggling to define morality for all of history, but

I will only briefly touch on these rich conversations. In the Phaedo, Socrates was quoted as saying “a system of morality based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar contraption which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.” His

102 argument implies that some sort of absolute right and wrong exist AND that the contamination of those “truths” by emotions is a dangerous and negative thing. This standpoint is an example of a normative definition of morality, or one which posits that all rational individuals should be able to abide by a set of "right" and wrong behaviors.

These "wrong" behaviors are those like intentionally harming someone or lying. This type of morality, similar to the concept of "natural law" would find that people or societies that do not behave in accordance with these moral rules are misguided or in need of salvation. More modern interpretations of normative morality do recognize that moral codes do shift and evolve time and across cultures.

The broad alternative conceptualization of morality more easily allows for cross- cultural differences in what is moral or immoral. Here, morality is descriptive: activities or behaviors can be immoral. Behaviors can be more or less moral than each other, and a society's punishments for violating moral codes can vary depending on context. The tension between definitional and normative morality is echoed in contemporary debates about morality and human psychology.

Essentially, many people argue that morality serves a utilitarian purpose. This argument was articulated by political philosopher Jeremey Bentham, and later, by John

Stewart Mill. Behaving “morally” serves both an individually- and societally-useful purpose: moral actions increase personal utility and regulate society (Driver 2009).

Rather than needing an all-powerful Leviathan to keep humanity’s darker impulses in check, moral behavior can itself lead to a more functional society. Mill also argued that

103 emotions serve a role in identifying correct moral behaviors – emotions like guilt serve to regulate individual behavior, which then is reflected in social and political policy.

Mill’s discussion of morality is echoed, strongly, in later work on emotions and moral psychology. Jonathan Haidt defined morality as “interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms which work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible” (Haidt 2008, 70). So, just as the Hobbesian Leviathan was constructed to keep the evil tendencies of humanity in check, Haidt argues that moral processes serve the same duty. Morality, rather than being something absolute, is actually something that is necessary to the health of civil society. The cyclicality of this definition allows “the moral” to be malleable across cultures and time periods. If the consequence of morality is social regulation, different societies need different regulations based on their distinct institutions and resources.

However, within societal and temporal constraints, individuals may differ in their “values and practices.” For something to be “immoral,” it needs to operate in such a way as to violate these interlocking values and institutions. The question remains: is a “scandal” is an event that does this, either by definition, or in particular circumstances?

None of the definitions of scandal, including mine, requires a scandal to be a moral violation. A scandal could result from a politician violating a law – perhaps, he received a speeding ticket but was a member of a public safety committee. This violates normal behavior for someone in his position, but would not necessarily be called immoral. My definition does require behaviors to violate standard codes of conduct. As my definition allows, audiences vary wildly in their assessment of what is and what is not

104 a transgression. Don Imus’s racist on-air comments (in which he referred to members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos”) may not have been considered scandalous to his traditional audience, but when the mainstream press replayed those comments to a more general audience, Imus resigned from his radio position under pressure. But, was Imus acting immorally? If one audience can deem something as “wrong,” and another audience does not, is the behavior truly “immoral?”

In a recent article exploring the causes of scandal, Basinger classifies "sex" scandals as moral scandals, terminologically (2013). This conflation of sex and morality, while understandable, neglects the way that scandals could violate morality for many other reasons. Lying and stealing are nearly universally condemned behaviors, and are also often codified as violations of "natural law" (Gert 2012). I point out that there are many reasons to think that morality might be integral to what we call scandal and that individual responses to scandal may be influenced by their own conceptions of what is moral or immoral. If graft and corruption essentially exploit public goods for private gain, those actions do not serve society’s better interest. Regulating them may not just be a financially-motivated process, but instead a moral imperative of a society. Essentially,

I argue that although immorality is not necessarily a component of scandal, it frequently co-occurs.

Ditto et al. (2009) argue that emotions and morality are “inextricably linked,” and humans “care deeply about right and wrong and will go to extraordinary lengths to protect and promote their moral beliefs,” (310). Regardless of the “source” of moral attitudes, people are inclined to have strong opinions about morality and, consequentially,

105 have strong emotional responses when something happens to affront their moral constructs. The types of behavior that activate these strong emotional responses can vary. At specific times in places, members of a culture can more-or-less agree on what counts as “moral” – or, at least, large and coherent subsets can agree – and these members experience negative emotions when the behaviors of others affront their construct. In this way, scandals may be seen as affronting these sensibilities, which may in turn anger and upset citizens.

Synthesizing morality and political scandal

Not all misdeeds are uniformly identified as wrong by all people. The mere fact that some politicians do survive their scandal indicates that either some scandals are not considered morally wrong to most, or that voters may respond to scandalous acts differently. Clearly, a politician killing his neighbor for no reason is something that most people, worldwide, would classify as an immoral (and criminal) behavior. However, some other animals people may deem "just wrong" may not harm anyone. For example, consensual sex between adults of the same sex, which doesn’t harm anyone but many people view as immoral, may be another example of an immoral act that does not affect individuals outside of the partnership. (Feinberg 1973). Some behaviors, including viewing certain types of pornography and engaging in homosexual activities, have become politicized issues. Many behaviors that eventually become scandals are they type of behavior where the citizen “doesn’t know why it’s wrong, but doesn’t like it anyway (Haidt 2001).”

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A burgeoning literature hybridizes psychological approaches to morality with voter decision making. Moral reasoning, a subsection of psychology, has a long history.

Lawrence Kohlberg revolutionized the field of moral reasoning with his six stages of moral development (Kohlberg 1976). Kohlberg’s model involves a stair-step process of moral development whereby people proceed from one step to the next as they acquire more sophisticated reasoning skills. Each of these stages involves more complex reasoning than the last, and Kohlberg argues that to progress from one stage to the next, each individual must experience the learning and growth that comes from existing in and dealing with the dilemmas of the preceding stage. An individual starts at the “avoiding punishment” stage (usually as a young child) and progresses through five additional phases, potentially ending at the “principled” stage (although Kohlberg did not find that any of his study’s participants had reached this stage). Carol Gilligan countered

Kohlberg’s claims and argued that his conception of morality as a step-based process ignored the idea of “care” (Gilligan 1982) and instead focused too heavily on justice.

Later theories have built on Gilligan and Kohlberg’s work. Jonathan Haidt and

Craig Joseph developed moral foundations theory (MFT) as a tool to explain why individuals may conceive morality in different ways. Originally, the theory was intended to explain differences in ethical practices across cultures (2004, Haidt et al. 1993), but the theory has more recently been applied to other areas. Moral foundations theory is rooted in the idea that, fundamentally, humans have innate and universal ethical intuitions.

However, acknowledging the wide variety in what different cultures call “moral,” the authors also point out that a second layer of morality is socially constructed. These social

107 constructions, which they term “virtues,” are moral components that are rooted in basic ethical beliefs but have been extended by humans to regulate behavior in a way that is beneficial to society. Since all societies differ, virtues differ depending on the needs of a particular culture.

An example of this distinction can be found in their discussion of “suffering.”

When a mother sees a child suffering, she will view this as a violation of her moral intuition. The associated virtue in this case would be called kindness, or compassion, which the mother would recognize and act upon, ideally to curtail the suffering of the child. Kindness and compassion serve the function of contributing to the growth of society by keeping members of that society safe from other members. In situations where competition for scarce resources exists, the virtue associated with suffering may be something more useful, like protection of family. Haidt and Joseph are interested in the ways these social constructions develop, and how they may vary across cultures. Haidt describes this social constructivism as “the coevolution of moral minds with cultural practices and institutions (Haidt 2007),” implying that the variation in virtues is an interaction between cultural objects and inherent moral tendencies.

Haidt and Joseph uncover four major “moral intuitions:” suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. They argue that although these intuitions are universal, their associated virtues are not. Later work on MFT has turned to differences across certain subsections of the American population. For political scientists, the most useful work here has focused on moral differences across liberals and conservatives (Graham et al.

2007, which found that differences in moral reasoning correlated with differences in

108 political ideology. Haidt and Joseph’s four intuitions became Graham et al.’s five moral foundations, which are currently: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, in-group/loyalty, respect/authority, and purity/sanctity16.

For purposes of clarity, I will be referring to Haidt’s 5 “moral foundations” by key words:

1) Harm/care = “Harm.” 2) Fairness/reciprocity = “Fairness” 3) Authority/respect = “Authority” 4) In-group/loyalty = “Loyalty” 5) Purity/sanctity - “Purity” Harm, as a moral foundation, concerns moral infractions where someone or something is hurt. A person who recognizes Harm will value compassion, caring, and behaving in a kind way towards others. Fairness supports not simply equal, but just, treatment of individuals – something that is “unfair” would be the great acquisition of wealth through ill-gotten gains at the expense of others. Authority, from a moral standpoint, includes the idea that individuals should respect their elders and superiors. A rude child would be someone who violates authority. Loyalty, similarly, is the idea that individuals should recognize who their kin and kind are, and form preferences for those people. Purity rests on the notion that individuals should not violate natural law, should not be unclean, and should recognize the importance of divinity.

Although both liberals and conservatives understand all five of the moral foundations, only harm/care and fairness/reciprocity are considered to be important for

16 In a 2012 paper, the team who study Moral Foundations Theory added a sixth foundation, which they called "Liberty/Oppression." The addition of this foundation, while it has interesting implications for politics, occurred too late for me to incorporate it into this research.

109 liberals. Conservatives place more equal importance on all five. The following figure is taken from Graham et al. (2009) and is based on a large, but non-representative online study run by Harvard University’s “Project implicit.”

Figure 4:1 Moral Foundations and Political Ideology

As this figure shows, even very conservative individuals tend to place greater importance in harm and fairness than they do in the other foundations, but Haidt’s overall argument is that conservatives consider more moral dimensions important than do liberals. In the context of scandals, this suggest conservatives may be more likely to view many more types of behavior as immoral, while liberals may be indifferent to behaviors unless they violate Harm or Fairness.

From moral foundations to candidate evaluation

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Scholars have found evidence that individual differences in moral foundations can predict a large number of outcomes, including partisan preferences, religious group membership, and attitudes about climate change (Dawson et al. 2012, Koleva et al. 2012,

Graham et al. 2009). Furthermore, manipulations to appeals encouraging recycling were found to be more effective when they were congruent with individual moral foundations

(Kidwell et al 2013).

At their root, moral foundations are actually what Haidt and Joseph called

“intuitive ethics” (Haidt and Joseph 2004). These ethical predispositions result in individuals feeling approval or disapproval when evaluating specific behaviors, even if they are not fully able to articulate the sources of these attitudes. Violations of moral foundations activate principals in individuals who are viewing these behaviors (Green and Haidt 2002), and the activation of these principals can change assessments of individuals and behaviors.

Scholars of emotions suggest that moral foundations actually have the potential to activate emotional responses, which then themselves influence the individual’s evaluation of specific behaviors. This is most true in the case of purity. Impure behaviors activate a disgust reaction in an individual, and individuals who place more importance in purity values tend to feel stronger disgust reactions when they encounter behaviors or objects that violate that foundation (Horberg et al 2009). When disgust is activated independent of purity, the assessments of behaviors are similar to when the purity moral foundation is activated.

Alternative Approaches

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If, as Moral Foundations Theory stipulates, individuals differ in their assessment of the importance of these different foundations, the natural extension of this argument would be that individuals will react in predictable ways to behaviors that “violate” the foundations they find important. But, the process of candidate evaluation is more complicated than a simple inputassessment relationship. Many studies have examined perceptions of candidates and politicians. Political science journals are filled with studies on how individuals come to decide who eventually will win their vote. Factors like the proximity between the candidate’s policy preferences and the voter’s policy preferences have formed fundamental building blocks in all subsequent analysis of candidate evaluation and voting behavior. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, scholars challenged the traditional assumptions that policy preferences and party identification were all important, and instead argued that candidates were not merely assessed as vessels for policy preferences. Rather, assessments of candidates are an interactive experience between the voter and the candidate, whereby all behaviors and characteristics of the candidate are evaluated by a dynamic voter, who has her own beliefs about issue importance and candidate personality.

In essence, these new lines of analysis argued that both voters and candidates are not homogenous. The “voter pool,” rather than simply being made up of individuals who differ in external characteristics, is composed of people who differ in their values and belief systems. A politician's behaviors are not just evaluated differently among people based on these characteristics, but can be seen differently depending on the characteristics of the voter and the candidate. For example, Pierce (1993) found that

112 political sophistication can lead to individuals being less likely to rely on assessments of a candidate’s traits when coming to their candidate preference.

When a voter “encounters” a politician for the first time, a variety of factors matter towards their global evaluation of that politician. Candidate appearance, the issue positions the candidate chooses, the gender of the candidate, and the candidate’s partisanship are all factors that the voter may consider in forming their global candidate

“impression.” Other, somewhat more intangible elements, like whether or not the candidate exhibits “leadership” qualities, are also factors the voter may consider.

Commonly called traits, these aspects of a candidate are important components in an individuals’ overall candidate-assessment (Funk 1999).

A wide variety of traits exist, and many have been studied in detail. Oftentimes, trait research focuses on competence and warmth traits (Funk 1999, Funk 1996, Castelli et al 2009). These two predominant traits are a somewhat slimmed down selection of the four traits originally used in trait work, which are leadership, integrity, empathy, and competence (Stroh 1995) Whether or not a candidate is perceived as competent is often related to overall candidate evaluation (Funk 1997, Kinder 1986). Scandals have the potential to affect voter perceptions of both competence and warmth, although as Funk found in 1996, candidates are more likely to be able to “shake off” the scandal if they still appear “competent,” regardless of whether or not they are perceived as warm.

Trait assessments pose an alternative explanation for how individuals evaluate scandalous politicians. Traits can be powerful: evidence also exists that trait assessments of candidates can be influenced by the gender of the candidate, with simply knowing the

113 candidate’s gender being enough for individuals to draw conclusions about the traits of that politician (Alexander and Anderson 1995). And, as Funk found, scandals influenced evaluations of politician traits, and these trait evaluations subsequently influenced attitudes about the politician.

Fundamentally, trait assessments are a cognitive process (Kinder 1986), but evidence exists that argues that emotions are actually better predictors of political evaluations than traits (Abelson et al. 1982). In the last 20 years, political scientists have started to consider the emotional processes which may affect candidate evaluation

(Redlawsk 2006). Certainly, a “warm” candidate may receive a more positive evaluation, but as Isbell and Ottati (2002) point out, a simple assessment of warm evaluations leading directly to improved evaluation may be missing the processes which are leading to that positive evaluation. It is possible that a person’s response to a moral infraction both affects their trait evaluations of the candidate and activates emotional responses, which in turn has consequences for the overall evaluation of the candidate, and I will attempt to use scandal as a case where the role of emotions and traits assessments can be explored.

HYPOTHESES:

Moral Foundations Theory postulates that people have differing implicit moral preferences, or “foundations.” While one person may be disgusted by the idea of homosexuality, another may feel deeply that income inequality is unjust. These differences can be explained by an individual’s distinctly unique moral preferences, and can be measured by the Moral Foundations Battery. Individual scores on this MFT scale are predictive of many aspects of their personality and behavior.

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Moral Foundations Theory has been found to be predictive of religious attitudes

(Graham and Haidt 2010) and liberal/conservative orientation (Graham et al. 2009. It has not yet been applied to the evaluation of political actors. In this study, I will look at what happens when a politician behaves in a way counter specific moral foundations.

Essentially: certain scandals may violate individual moral foundations. When this happens, the individual experiences an emotional reaction. Subsequently, they negatively evaluate the politician who was involved in a scandal. These negative evaluations are moderated by whether the individual shares the same party as the target.

Given this causal argument, I test two hypotheses. Assuming that scandals can violate moral foundations,17 I first hypothesize that individuals experience negative reactions to these scandals if they themselves are predisposed to placing importance in the violated foundation. The first hypothesis arises from one of the basic precepts of moral foundations theory, which is that individuals vary in their assessments of the morality of the behavioral acts of others. Some individuals place more importance in the perceived “purity” of a behavior, while others believe that harmful behaviors are the most negatively consequential. If a politician is involved in a scandal that violates a moral foundation the individual values, the individual will be more likely to negatively evaluate that politician. This leads me to my first hypothesis:

Hypothesis One: Individuals will more negatively evaluate a politician who

engages in a scandal that violates the moral foundations that are important to

those individuals.

17 This assumption is one I feel comfortable making based on extensive pretesting I did prior to this dissertation.

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Politicians do not act in a vacuum. Shared partisanship between the target politician and his constituents is usually the most powerful predictor of candidate evaluations. Therefore, my second hypothesis accounts for the predictable relationship arising from shared partisanship between the evaluator and the politician:

Hypothesis Two: Individuals will respond less negatively to a politician involved

in scandal when they share the same partisanship.

Essentially, I expect partisanship to act as a buffer against the negative emotions experienced after learning of a scandal. Even if the politician does activate a negative emotional response in individuals, the politician may be able to recover with constituents who share his party.

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN:

The use of experiments in political science has dramatically increased since early in the 20th century (Druckman et al. 2006). These experiments have taken place both in laboratories and in the field (Iyengar 2011, Gerber and Green 2000). Unlike traditional observational work, experiments grant the scholar the ability to “play God,” (Druckman et al. 2006), manipulating the variables of interest while usually holding conflating variables constant. More recently, scholars have attempted to take advantage of the benefits of experimental rigor while allowing for the difficulty of applying experimental treatments to a real-world by taking advantage of natural variation in causal mechanisms with natural experiments (Dunning 2007). For studies of media effects, which are popular across numerous disciplines (including communication and psychology), it is common to present experiment participants with altered media treatments (Nelson et al.

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2011) to present information to the participants in a realistic, but controlled, way. In this tradition, I presented a student sample (discussed below) with one of 12 hypothetical news articles embedded in an artificially constructed website, which can be seen in

Appendix D. The students were asked a series of questions before and after reading the short article.

The articles were written in short-form journalistic style, and described a white, male politician who was involved in a scandal. The content of the scandal was manipulated to activate one of the four moral foundations, as I will discuss. Each article was written as to suggest little possibility that the politician was falsely accused, and the politician involved refused to comment for the story. The newspaper articles reference a fictitious Iowa State Journal, selected because of Iowa’s status as a swing-state and its distance from Ohio. The selection of a state like Wyoming would present complications, because although students would be unlikely to detect that the article was fictitious, they might assume that the politicians in the articles were more conservative.

This experiment is a 3x4 factorial design. These manipulations will be explained below.

Manipulation #1: Partisanship

One of the most important decisions in any experiment involving fabricated

American politicians is whether to include information about partisanship (McGraw

2011). A “partisanship-free” politician mutes the in-group loyalty an individual might have with an elected official. Scholars are well aware of the tendency of citizens to infer characteristics about politicians based on their party identification (see, for example,

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Conover and Feldman 1989). Therefore, it is difficult if not impossible to assume that a study of fictitious candidates whose parties remained ambiguous can tell us much about the “real world,” where partisanship is so salient.

With this in mind, I manipulate the party identification of the fictitious politicians in these fabricated news articles by stating the politician’s political affiliation when introducing them in the article. I preceded the first mention of the politician with the phrase: “[Democratic] or [Republican] or [State Supreme Court Justice]” [Politician’s name]. 1/3 of the participants read an article about a Republican politician, while 1/3 read an article about a Democratic politician. The remaining third read an article about a nonpartisan Judge. So as to keep the articles as similar as possible, the Judge is elected but not partisan – a particular combination of factors found in many US States, including

Ohio. The inclusion of a Judge allows for there to be a nonpartisan target without compromising the external validity of the study.

Manipulation #2: Moral Foundation:

The main manipulation here is a straightforward one. Moral Foundations Theory describes five major Moral Foundations (Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, In- group/Loyalty, Respect/Authority, and Purity/Sanctity). In order to decrease the number of manipulations (thereby maximizing statistical power), the experiment provided participants fabricated news articles that activate four of the five foundations. The eliminated foundation is In-group/Loyalty, which tends to be the least predictive of political behavior (Graham et al. 2009). This foundation is also already activated in this study due to the addition of party identification cues.

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The manipulations of the moral foundations were pretested on several Political

Science undergraduate courses at the Ohio State University. To activate Harm, I presented a story where the politician was accused by his adult children of violent child abuse. I intentionally specified the violent nature of the abuse so as to prevent also activating purity by allowing participants to assume that the violence could have been sexual. To activate Purity, the politician was accused of shamelessly watching animal pornography on his computer; the choice of animals was made so as to minimize the concurrent activation of harm (as well as to make the event particularly powerful). To activate Fairness, the politician was accused of granting committee position in exchange for monetary favors. Finally, to activate Authority, the politician had shouted out “Hurry up, old man” during his elderly colleague’s departure speech. In some cases (e.g.

Fairness) activating fairness without activating the other moral foundations is not too difficult, whereas in other cases it was difficult to parse apart one moral foundation without also activating other moral concerns. I completed pre-testing on an Ohio State student sample, through which I hoped to identify news stories that would have the strongest pure effect – in other words, I did not want to activate more than one moral foundation at the same time. All of these treatments can be found in Appendix D.

These scandals are of relative strength, and I do not anticipate that they will all activate the same magnitude of response. Child abuse, even to someone who does not recognize harm as an important moral foundation, will likely elicit stronger negative responses than even extreme rudeness. The purpose of this chapter is not to determine the most offensive types of political behavior, but to explore reactions to multiple types

119 of scandal. Therefore, even if the responses to the Harm scandal are overall more negative than the responses to the Authority scandal, the relationship of interest is that of the variance in moral foundational preferences and attitudes towards the politicians.

Sample:

The experiment administered in early 2011 to 150 undergraduate political science students at Ohio State University. The sample was 45% female. 82% of the sample identified as white, 5% as African or African/American, and the remaining 13% as other races. 40% of the students declared themselves to be Republicans, 53% declared that they were Democrats, and 8% were independent. The mean age of the sample was 21.

The modal student taking the experiment was a white, male, 21 year-old Democrat.

Measures:

All of the individual difference measures were presented to the participants before they read the news article. This ordering choice was made so that the participants’ scores on these batteries (particularly the moral foundations questionnaire) were not affected by reading a news article about an immoral politician.

Individual Differences:

Party ID: I included a standard 1-7 measure of party identification, with 1 representing

“strong Republican,” 4 indicating an independent voter, and 7 indicating a strong

Democrat. This variable is necessary to control for the favoring of hypothetical candidates sharing the voter’s own party.

Race: Race was included as a standard control variable. I do not expect it to lead to any significant differences in analysis.

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Gender: Gender was also included as a standard control variable. As one of the scenarios includes a description of child abuse, it is hypothetically possible that female participants might be more likely to have more negative evaluations of that candidate.

Trust: Trust was included as a 10-item scale. I do not expect trust to have any strong effects on the dependent variables, but included it as a control. It is possible that individuals who are more trusting of politicians would be more likely to feel “violated” by reading about a politician who behaved in an untrustworthy way. It is also possible that, since the guilt of the politician was left ambiguous, the more trusting participants would be less likely to cast negative judgment on the politician until learning more details about the politician’s likely guilt.

Moral Foundations:

The moral foundations were included as a 32-item battery, which can be found in

Appendix E, administered in the first part of the experiment, directly taken from moralfoundations.org. Some of these items are reverse-coded to account for satisficing behavior. This scale can be used to create 5 indexes, on which individuals can score in the range of 0-36.

DESCRIPTIVE DATA:

Before beginning analysis, I present the basic results for the major scales.

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Min Max Mean Harm 8 33 22 Fairness 13 31 23 Authority 8 32 21 Loyalty 6 31 21 Purity 3 30 17 Table 4:1 Participant Scores on MFT scale

As can be seen in Table 4:1, the minimum to maximum ranges of the participants fell within similar ranges of each other. The means, also, were similar among the five variables, with the exception of Purity. The low scores on this scale may be explained by the student sample. In other studies on this concept, purity did not diverge so noticeably from the scores on the other scales (Graham et al 2009).

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Harm Fairness Authority Loyalty Purity Harm 1.00 Fairness 0.57** 1.00 Authority -0.02 -0.09 1.00 Loyalty 0.07 0.12* 0.67** 1.00 Purity 0.11 -0.04 0.63** 0.52** 1.00

** Indicates significant correlation at 0.00 level, * indicates significant correlation at the 0.05 level.

Table 4:2 Correlations between Moral Foundations

10 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Purity Authority Loyalty Fairness Harm

Figure 4:2 Means of MF scores and Participant Ideology (7 is most liberal)

In Figure 4:2, we can see that the participant scores generally track with expectations based on work by Graham et al. (2009). Very conservative individuals tend

123 to consider all five foundations to be somewhat important, but very liberal individuals prioritize Harm and Fairness. Very liberal individuals also value those two foundations more than conservative individuals do. I explored the relationship across party identification and identified a similar pattern.

Also replicating previous work on this scale is the finding that loyalty and purity and authority all correlate with each other, while harm and fairness correlate with each other (these correlations can be seen in Table 4:2). This finding confirms that this student sample is not that different from traditional American samples, at least with regards to their performance on the moral foundations battery.

Finally, I explored the reliability of each scale, and found that the scales are differentially reliable.

Cronbach's alpha Harm 0.64 Fairness 0.49 Loyalty 0.75 Authority 0.66 Purity 0.68 Table 4:3 Reliability of Moral Foundations Scales

The Cronbach’s alpha tests for some of these scales are low, probably due to the small sample size and the small number of items in the scale18. The limited alpha values may decrease the likelihood that significant results can be uncovered.

18 The Fairness Cronbach’s alpha is particularly low; this replicates other work on this topic where Fairness coheres less well than the other scales (Kolova et al. 2012).

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Dependent Variables:

I included a number of dependent variables, all designed to measure individual assessments of the politicians involved in scandal.

Perceived Severity: I asked individuals to measure how bothered they were by the politician's actions in the article.

Feeling thermometer: Perhaps the most basic measure of candidate evaluation, the feeling thermometer measure simply asks the participants to rate, on a 1-100 scale, how

“warmly” they feel about the candidate. The advantages of this scale include that it is more continuous than traditional 1-7 measures, although respondent answers tend to cluster in predictable ways around values like 25, 50, and 75.

Behavioral Measures: As a measure of behavior, rather than simple evaluation, participants were asked if they would be willing to sign a petition to remove the politician from office. They were also asked if they would vote for the individual, in relevant circumstances, if they had the ability to do so. The petition measure, unlike the vote measure, is perhaps the measure with the greatest “consequence” for the participant, as any participant would not know that the petition was fake until after the conclusion of the experiment.

Emotional Batteries: According to the Moral Foundations Theory, individuals have a clear emotional response to behaviors that violate their moral foundations. Although most emotional batteries ask respondents to report a variety of positive and negative emotions, to minimize the likelihood of participant satisficing, I only asked the respondents to report their negative emotions. These included disgust, bitterness, anger, contempt,

125 anxiety, and worry. The questions were asked so that the respondent was supposed to evaluate the politician’s behavior. The question was phrased:

Do the actions of {Politician} make you feel: “Very anxious”, “a little anxious,” “not anxious at all.” The means of the values of these variables, by condition, are in Table 4:4.

Disgust Bitterness Anger Contempt Anxiety Worry Authority 3.65 3.23 3.34 3.31 2.55 2.53 Fairness 3.47 3.21 3.4 3.12 2.51 3.16 Harm 4.19 3.54 3.97 3.47 2.86 3.22 Purity 4.03 2.92 3.03 2.92 2.74 3.24 One-way Anova F- 3.97 2.01 5.43 2.59 1.00 2.52 Test scores (0.01) (0.12) (0.00) (0.06) (0.39) (0.06) (P values in Parentheses) Table 4:4 Emotion activation by treatment condition, means

Participants in the Harm scenarios tended to report the “strongest” responses to all of the emotional questions, and disgust appeared to be the emotion most activated by all of the conditions. In other words, the scandal treatments do not make participants anxious or worried, but they do seem to make them disgusted and angry (the second most activated emotion). This fits with what one might expect – there isn’t a good reason to expect that someone will be worried about a politician she’s never heard of who lives in another state.

I also ran a series of one-way ANOVA tests. As can be seen in Table 4:4, the responses to the emotion questions did appear to vary by condition, except for the

126 measure of anxiety and bitterness. In other words, the emotional responses did separate out by condition, but not in the case of bitterness or anxiety.

It is possible that these six emotions can reduce into a smaller number of emotional “responses” to the scandal. Accordingly, I performed principle components factor analysis on the six emotional responses. The variables all cluster onto one factor, indicating that – in this case – the emotion responses can all be collapsed into one variable. The rotated factor loadings between the six distinct variables and the resulting, constructed, emotion factor variable are displayed in Table 4:5.

Factor 1 Disgusted 0.71 Bitter 0.79 Angry 0.78 Contempt 0.62 Anxious 0.68 Worried 0.74 Table 4:5 Correlation between emotions and resulting factor variable

For the purposes of this experiment, participants did not appear to differentiate between their emotional responses to the scandal. Participants who had emotional responses did not experience anxiety as a separate emotion from anger; rather, participants seemed to either experience an emotional response or not.

Participants were also asked to assess the traits of the politicians involved in scandal. Perceived politician traits can be significant predictors of voter preferences; as

Funk (1996) found, scandals often effect individual trait evaluations of politicians, which

127 can in turn lead to more negative evaluations. I asked the participants to evaluate the traits of the politicians, and performed exploratory factor analysis to see whether the traits collapse onto a smaller number of factors. The rotated factor loadings of the traits and the three factors these traits collapse into are shown in Table 4:6.

Intelligent Warm Dishonest Moral 0.33 0.44 -0.20 Caring 0.27 0.67 0.11 Warm 0.22 0.8 0.13 Friendly 0.31 0.7 -0.01 Skillful 0.7 0.35 0.28 Intelligent 0.81 0.23 0.09 Knowledgeable 0.27 0.23 0.02 Strong Leader 0.77 0.07 -0.18 Dishonest -0.06 0.27 0.83 Out of Touch 0.22 -0.28 0.13 Table 4:6: Correlations between Traits and resulting factors.

In this case, the traits collapse in a reasonable pattern. The first factor appears to capture traits associated with strong leadership, including the “intelligent” and “skillful” traits.

The second factor captures the friendly and warm traits, and to a lesser extent, the politician deemed to be the most “moral.” The third factor captures the dishonest or immoral traits; morality is negatively correlated with the third factor, while “dishonest” is positively correlated.

I used these factor loadings to create three trait variables, thereby minimizing the number of trait variables. These variables will be used later in the hypothesis testing.

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ESTIMATION:

Due to the small number of individuals per cell, with a minimum of 5 (in the story about a Democrat violating authority) and a maximum of 18 (the story about a nonpartisan Judge violating Harm) per cell, I generated three variables to reduce the number of treatments. One variable was constructed to identify whether the individual shared the party identification with the target. Independents and those individuals in the judicial treatments were all assigned a score of “0” on this -1 to 1 scaled variable. The second variable broke the conditions down into four groups, based only on the type of foundation violated. The third variable simply accounted for which of the three “types” of politician the participant read about: Republican, Democrat, or Judge.

To begin testing the first hypothesis, I first examined a series of zero-correlation matrices, across each scandal condition. These can be seen in Tables 4:8. Preliminary support for hypothesis one could be found if the particular foundation was significantly correlated with any of the evaluation or outcome measures.

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HARM CONDITION Harm Fairness Authority Loyalty Purity Feeling Thermometer 0.05 0.26 0 -0.03 -0.04 Perceived Severity 0.19 -0.05 -0.01 -0.08 0.04 Emotions 0.16 0.05 0.11 0.08 0.09 Trait: Intelligent 0.12 0.44** -0.03 0.16 -0.14 Trait: Warm -0.32 -0.14 -0.23 -0.26 -0.01 Trait: Dishonest 0.05 0.05 -0.01 -0.01 -0.21 Vote 0.14 0.09 -0.11 -0.13 -0.23 Petition -0.06 0.04 0.01 0.22 0.07 N=37 FAIRNESS CONDITION Harm Fairness Authority Loyalty Purity Feeling Thermometer 0.05 -0.25 0.19 -0.2 0.09 Perceived Severity -0.18 0.01 -0.07 -0.11 -0.23 Emotions 0.15 0.31 -0.21 -0.14 -0.1 Trait: Intelligent 0.15 0.1 0.14 0.09 0.33** Trait: Warm -0.26 -0.22 -0.1 -0.09 -0.28* Trait: Dishonest 0.07 0.11 -0.26 0.12 0.01 Vote 0.04 0.04 -0.16 -0.06 -0.11 Petition 0.03 0.1 -0.06 0.04 -0.1 N=43 AUTHORITY CONDITION Harm Fairness Authority Loyalty Purity Feeling Thermometer -0.51** -0.21 -0.11 -0.12 -0.12 Perceived Severity 0.64*** 0.42** -0.22 0.02 0.05 Emotions 0.31 0.31 0.16 0.49*** 0.29 Trait: Intelligent -0.14 -0.09 0.22 0.04 -0.13 Trait: Warm -0.4** -0.26 0.11 0.07 0 Continued Table 4:7 Correlations

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Table 4:7 Continued

Trait: Dishonest 0.12 -0.11 0.2 0.41** 0.22 Vote -0.41** -0.21 0.2 0.15 0.03 Petition 0.21 0.02 -0.24 -0.09 -0.13 N=31 PURITY CONDITION Harm Fairness Authority Loyalty Purity Feeling Thermometer -0.07 -0.28* -0.23 -0.18 -0.36** Perceived Severity 0.35 0.16 0.29 0.24 0.60*** Emotions 0.24 0.12 0.16 0.15 0.55*** Trait: Intelligent -0.27 -0.45*** -0.28* -0.32* -0.32* Trait: Warm 0.04 -0.13 -0.06 -0.03 -0.06 Trait: Dishonest -0.16 -0.11 -0.17 -0.14 -0.03 Vote -0.05 0.11 0.02 0.17 -0.14 Petition 0.04 -0.08 -0.1 -0.03 0.13 N=38

As can be seen in these tables, it does not appear that moral foundation preferences correlate with variations in the assessment of politicians, with the exception of in the

Purity condition. In that condition, purity was significantly correlated with feeling negative emotions, perceiving the scandal to be more severe, and with cooler scores on the feeling thermometer. In none of the other conditions was the expected relationship between moral foundation and evaluation demonstrated, leading to a caveated rejection of

Hypothesis One.

However, in the Authority condition, individuals scoring high in Harm had strong negative reactions to the politician involved in that scandal. Not only did they perceive

131 the violation to be stronger, but their assessment of the politician’s warmth was also negatively affected. This speaks to a curious relationship between that particular scandal

(which involved a politician interrupting an elderly man during his farewell speech) and the Harm foundation. Perhaps the scandal did not sufficiently activate authority, but rather, reading about an elderly man brought to the point of tears was seen as a harmful event, engendering protective reactions among the individuals in that condition.

I will discuss the non-findings later in this chapter, but first I will explore whether the findings in the purity condition are actually caused by partisanship dynamics. To test whether shared partisanship was actually generating the relationship, rather than the level of purity, I performed a 2x3 ANOVA using the feeling thermometer variable as the dependent variable. When including the shared party factor in the ANOVA, the relationship still holds and the affects can be seen below in Figures 4:3 and 4:4. For

Figure 4:2 I split the individuals in the purity condition into three classes -- those who scored low, those who scored near the mean, and those who scored high. Each group contained the same number of individuals.

Level of Purity By target 50 50 40 40 30 30 20 20 10 10 0 0 Low Purity Mid Purity High Purity Judge Different Same

Figures 4:3 and 4:4: Feeling thermometers by condition, Purity Assessment

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As is clear from Figures 4:3 and 4:4 individuals are more less likely to condemn politicians who violate purity norms if they do not score high on the purity aspect of the moral foundations theory or if they share the same party as the politician in question

(Judges are treated much the same as politicians with shared partisanship).

From the results thus far, I do not find support for Hypothesis One. It is only in the Purity condition that results appear to support the hypothesis. Perhaps it is only the case that individuals evaluate sex scandals in a moral lens, and view all other types of scandals outside of the traditional moral view. I will explore this, and other possible interpretations of these results later in this chapter.

To better explore the interaction between moral foundations and partisanship, and perhaps find support for Hypothesis 2, I will display whether the treatment conditions had simultaneous effects on the dependent variables. The treatments varied on two major dimensions: the partisanship of the actor, and the type of scandal he became involved in.

The partisanship of the politician can serve two purposes. It serves as a cue for indicating the similarity between the participant and the politician. The partisanship of the politician could also serve as a candidate trait in its own right. Regardless of the party identification of the participant, it is possible that he may be more likely to negatively evaluate a Republican for participating in certain types of behaviors. Both versions of partisanship can be tested. The other dimension on which the treatments varied was that of the moral foundation violated.

In the first series of tests, I will run a series of ANOVA models. The factor variables are either the measure of shared party identification between the participant and

133 the politician (hereafter known as “Shared Partisanship”) or the party of the politician

(hereafter known as “Party,” keeping in mind that one possibility in this case is a nonpartisan Judge) and the moral foundation factor. These tests do not account for any individual differences in the participants themselves, but would merely register differences between different treatment groups, indicating treatment effects. Similarly, these treatment effects do not actually test Hypothesis 2, but merely allow for me to distinguish between reactions to the different articles, which could be explained in a variety of ways. The presence of treatment effects is not enough to argue that moral reasoning is occurring, only that the sample had different responses to the different conditions. The presence of an interaction between moral foundation condition and the partisanship of the actor, however, implies that all politicians are not treated equally in equal situations, and that their partisanship affects evaluations differently in different circumstances.

The second series of tests are ANOVA models that I will run within the four moral foundation treatment groups. In this case, I can account for participant differences with regards to moral foundations, so I can see whether individuals who score higher on the “Harm” variable are more likely to condemn the politician in Harm, and so on across the different conditions. This test will begin to verify Hypothesis 2.

First, I performed a series of 3x4 factorial ANOVAs to see the effects of the moral foundation treatments and the partisanship of the politician. According to

Hypothesis 2 the effect of the moral foundation treatments will vary depending on the partisanship of the politician, with participants being less likely to negatively assess a

134 politician who shares their own partisanship. Indeed, this is predominantly what I find.

By and large, a consistent pattern shows regardless of whether party is used as the second factor, or whether shared partisanship serves that function. Tables 4:09 and 4:10 below, show the results of these ANOVA tests.

Moral Politician Interaction Foundation Party Attitudinal 3.28 2.64 2.30 Perceived Severity (0.02) (0.08) (0.05) Feeling 5.33 6.64 2.22 Thermometer (0.00) (0.00) (0.06) Emotions 2.65 2.14 2.31 Emotions (0.05) (0.12) (0.05) Trait variables 1.34 2.14 2.2 Intelligent (0.26) (0.12) (0.06) 6.55 1.86 0.70 Warm (0.00) (0.16) (0.63) 1.19 4.01 1.82 Dishonest (0.31) (0.02) (0.11) Cells contain F tests, probabilities in parentheses. Table 4:8: Two-Model comparison of 2x2 ANOVA results, F-Tests

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Moral Shared Foundation Partisanship Interaction Attitudes 3.10 15.05 5.77 Perceived Severity (0.03) (0.00) (0.00) 3.42 2.97 3.60 Feeling Thermometer (0.02) (0.09) (0.02) Emotions 5.23 12.55 5.54 Emotions (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Traits 1.22 0.22 0.44 Intelligent (0.31) (0.64) (0.72) 5.82 0.00 0.88 Warm (0.00) (0.97) (0.46) 1.09 0.06 0.57 Dishonest (0.36) (0.81) (0.63) Cells contain F tests, probabilities in parentheses Table 4:9 ANOVA tests for attitudinal, emotional, and trait measures

On first glance, it appears as though there may be potential support for Hypothesis 2, with the interaction variable demonstrating significance in all of the attitudinal and emotional tests. The results also suggest that perceptions of the scandals severity varied by moral foundation condition and shared partisanship. With ANOVA, significant interactions mean that the treatment affects are a complex relationship between the different factorial variables, or that the effect of one of the treatment variables is moderated by the effect of another treatment variable. Therefore, the pattern of means must be examined to understand the meaning of this significant interaction. These relationships are below, in Figures 4:4 and 4:5

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Figure 4:5: Means on Feeling Thermometer by Treatment Group and Shared

Partisanship measure

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Figure 4:6: Means on Feeling Thermometer by Treatment Group by Party

Condition

From Figures 4:5 and 4:6 we can see that the participants behaved as expected (with participants evaluating the politician sharing their own party more favorably than the politician in the out-party) with one noticeable exception (the difference for the authority condition was slight). The participants in the fairness group were much more likely to positively-evaluate the politician if the politician did not share their party. In the fairness condition, the politician granted favors to a campaign supporter, which means that the participants evaluating an out-party politician would actually be hurting their own party by more positively evaluating the out-party politician. Perhaps by negatively evaluating the politician sharing their own party, they were attempting to distance themselves from

138 someone who showed that type of unfair behavior – although it remains an open question as to why that relationship did not exist in the other conditions, some of which involved more egregious offenses. Regardless of the results here, this table illustrates a

“crossover” effect on the Shared Partisanship + Moral Foundation model, where the two factor variables affect the dependent variable in different directions. In the fairness condition, shared partisanship decreases the assessment of the politician’s behavior, whereas in the other three conditions shared partisanship increases that assessment, as

Hypothesis 2 suggests. Similarly, and unexpectedly, Figure 2 shows that in most conditions the Republican, Democrat, and Judge were viewed relatively similarly – but in the Purity condition, the Democrat was evaluated more negatively and in the Authority condition, the Judge faced extra scrutiny.19

For perceptions of severity, the means behaved nearly identically. I do not include figures for these tests, but in the Purity condition, individuals were far less negative in their perceptions of the politician’s misdeeds when they shared the same party. In the other conditions, this relationship was muted, but still (except for in the fairness condition) present. Generally, this suggests that since the perceptions of the scandal’s severity are related to the individual’s moral preferences in the purity condition, the moral foundational preferences influence evaluations of the politician through both emotional responses and perceptions of severity.

19 A test for the success of random assignment does find that the participants assigned to the Democrat and Republican conditions did not differ on partisanship – each sample had a relatively equal distribution of Republican, Democrat, and independent participants.

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The feeling thermometer assessments for the Judge seemed to be the lowest for all groups regardless of treatment – except for in the case of the purity treatment, in which case it was highest. This confirms the assumption that Judges may be evaluated more harshly for transgressions, particularly if those transgressions are illegal. The means here behave in a somewhat surprising way, in that the Republican was condemned most in the harm condition, whereas the Democrat was condemned most in the Purity condition.

Finally, I present two two-stage least squares regression models, using the feeling thermometer as the dependent variable. In the first model, I use the collapsed emotions factor variable as the instrumental variable, predicting that moral foundation scores predict both the feeling thermometer scores as well as the emotions values. By running a two-stage model, I can control for this endogeneity and glean some information about the causal relationship that emotional reactions play in this story. To explore the alternative causal story here, which is that the trait assessments influence the evaluations of the politicians, I also run a two-stage least squares model using the “competence” trait as the instrumental variable. I collapse all of the treatments into one model, and also control for participant gender and shared partisanship with the target. These models can be seen in table 4:10.

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(1) (2) Second Stage Variables -9.5** Emotions (4.1674) -- 2.00 3.75 Gender (3.41) (5.36) 0.51 2.01 Shared Partisanship (2.29) (3.17) 22.82 Trait: Intelligence -- (23.9) First Stage Instruments 0.02 -0.00 Harm (0.02) (0.02) 0.04 0.00 Fair (0.03) (0.03) -0.05* 0.02 Authority (0.02) (0.03) 0.00 -0.02 Loyalty (0.02) (0.02) 0.06** -0.01 Purity (0.02) (0.02) For Model (1), the Instrumental variable is the Emotions factor, which was regressed on the Five moral foundations measures. For Model (2), the instrumental variable was the Intelligence Trait, also regressed on the MFT measures. * Indicates significance at the 0.1 level, ** indicates significance at the 0.05 level. Values shown are two stage least squares regression coefficients, values in parentheses are their standard errors.

Table 4:10: Feeling Thermometer, Two-Stage Least Squares Models

From Table 4:10, it is clear that emotions play a role in the evaluation of the target politicians, even when crudely collapsing all of the conditions into one model. In the first stage, the purity and authority foundation scales are predictive of the emotional reaction, which is then itself predictive of the feeling thermometer score. The same did not hold for the trait model – moral foundation preferences didn’t predict trait assessments, which

141 did not predict feeling thermometer scores. Again, this seems to indicate that emotions play a mediating role in the evaluation of scandalous political actors, and that purity assessments seem to be the primary driver of these emotional reactions. In these cases, shared partisanship may still play a moderating role, even it did not rise to statistical significance in this causal model.

DISCUSSION

Although unexpected, the results also suggest that different types of scandal lead to differences in levels of moral reasoning. For the participants who read the purity treatment, the importance placed in the purity moral foundation was predictive of their response to the scandal, and they were more likely to derogate the politician when they were in the opposite party to that politician. Judges were treated much the same as in- party members in these cases.

Purity, as a moral foundation, has interesting implications for this study. Kolova et al. (2012) recently found that purity far outperformed the other moral foundations in predicting attitudes towards “culture war” attitudes (including attitudes towards pornography, which was the scandal in my study). To some extent, scandals may speak to evolving notions of normal behavior for politicians. Do some Americans believe that the high standard traditionally held by elected officials is no longer as necessary as it once was? Now that the three most recent American presidents have admitted to drug use (of some sort), are traditionally taboo-behaviors starting to be seen as normalized by all Americans other than those who value purity? These questions cannot be fully answered by this dissertation, but these findings are suggestive.

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I found conditional support for my first hypothesis, and more compelling support for my second. Other than in the purity condition, individual evaluations of the target politician did not seem to be influenced by the individual's moral foundations. A few explanations could explain this null finding. The cell sizes may have been too small, first of all. The student sample may not depend on moral reasoning to evaluate politicians -- perhaps they are not politically sophisticated enough to use these higher reasoning techniques. The non-null finding for the purity condition suggests that some moral reasoning is used for evaluation of scandal, but it may only be applied to scandals that are considered to be moral violations.

I did find support for my second hypothesis, with the interesting additional finding that politicians who violated the fairness foundation were actually more likely to be protected by out-group members. This could be random noise, or it could be that individuals who read about a politician of the opposite party granting favors to friends, they do not feel bothered by this "internal" matter to the opposite party.

The role of emotions was pronounced throughout. Individuals who reported higher levels of negative emotional reactions had generally lower assessments of the politicians. The causal arrows for this finding are complex. It is possible that the emotional reaction was dictated by the negative attitude, or vice versa. More work is necessary to fully parse out the causal arrows here -- emotional reactions did vary by condition, suggesting that the scores on the emotional batteries may have influenced broader attitudinal measures.

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The mixed support for the first Hypothesis beg further research. It is possible that individuals are quicker to tie morality to purity-related behaviors. Purity behaviors are often also behaviors which define the culture wars, and so individuals may have their sensibilities more attuned to moralize these behaviors. Perhaps, however, individuals could be influenced to view other behaviors through a moral lens if the scandal were framed that way or if individuals were primed to consider the moral content of the scandal. I believe this is particularly true for any scandals involving a financial element.

Bribery or fraud may be seen as a norm violation at first glance, but were the scandal described in broader moralistic terms, individuals may have their moral foundations of fairness activated. More testing is necessary, but the results in this chapter at least suggest that moral reasoning plays a role in scandal evaluation and that role may not be isolated to one type of scandal.

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CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS

In this dissertation, I set out to explore the ways in which scandals develop, how individuals evaluate scandalous politicians, and what – if anything – might a politician do in order to survive his scandal and remain in office. I employed two methodological techniques: observational database collection, and laboratory experiment. The analysis of my database, the first of its kind to rely almost entirely on media reports of scandal at both the national and state level, uncovers some promising early finding about the presence of scandals in America, but more research is needed to more fully understand why scandals appear more frequently at some points in American history than others.

Similarly, my findings about individual evaluations of political actors involved in scandal yield interesting suggestive findings, but lack strong external validity or a large enough sample size to stand alone; more research is necessary.

My main findings are as follows:

1) By and large, situational factors trump politician-specific factors. The

professionalism of a political body, the proximity of a scandal to an election, and

whether or not the member serves in the US Senate are all positive predictors of

scandal. Taken together, these findings preliminarily suggest that in situations

where the politician has access to higher levels of power (and more attention from

the media), scandals are likely to occur with greater frequency. The untested

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alternative here is that the media focuses with more attention on higher-profile

politicians and legislative bodies, leading to the greater likelihood that scandalous

activity will be “caught,” and thereby publicized. These two explanations, which

could both be true, are testable, and should be explored in further research.

2) Individual-level characteristics do not seem to predict a politician’s likelihood of

becoming involved in scandal. Gender, race, party, wealth – none of the

traditional individual difference measures predicted scandal involvement.

However, perhaps the most compelling individual difference measures, which are

those related to a politician’s personality, are unmeasurable at this time.

Narcissism, and “corruptibility” may be compelling explanations for why a

politician may be more or less likely to be involved in scandal. However, those

characteristics are also associated with gender, and gender did not predict

involvement in scandal. Perhaps these personality characteristics correlate with

other, more easily measured variables, and by accounting for those variables I

would be able to discover whether certain politicians are more scandal-prone than

others.

3) At the evaluation phase of scandal, individual differences do seem to predict

reactions to scandal. The amount of importance the individual placed in the moral

foundation of purity predicted how she would react when a politician was

involved in a purity-activating scandal, even controlling for shared partisanship

with the politician, which normally protects individual evaluations. This finding

indicates that even though not all scandals may be seen as moral offenses, some

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scandals can activate moral considerations which can then shape evaluations.

Interestingly, this seems to also imply that (a) individuals could be primed to

think about non-sex scandals in moral terms, and (b) scandals could be framed

such to activate these moral considerations in populations likely to place higher

value in purity, including lower socio-economic-status groups.

4) As I mentioned, shared partisanship protects the politician. Even if a politician is

accused of child abuse, Democrats are more likely to view the actions as less

negative if the target is a Democrat, and the same happens with Republicans.

Whether or not this protective effect is an active “favoring” of like politicians, or

an unwillingness to believe that the politician actually committed the actions of

which he was accused is still unknown. However, the favoring of the like

politician can be moderated by moral foundation considerations.

5) Once accused of a scandal, outcomes vary widely. Seniority is positively

correlated with “surviving” one’s scandal, but not necessarily when the decision

for the politician is between resigning or running for reelection. Politicians who

were involved in sex scandals are more likely to resign than politicians who were

involved in non-sex scandals. This is interesting, because sex scandals generally

have the least negative impact on the policy (and they usually are not illegal).

They also do not necessarily affect a politician’s perceived levels of competence.

Although the five major findings I articulated above deserve further discussion, I will first discuss the ways I could improve some of these tests by including additional information. As an additional way to measure whether access to power does seem to

147 influence the likelihood of a member being involved in scandal, I could run a time-series analysis of all US Congressmembers and their likelihood of becoming involved in scandal. Presumably, variables like the member’s time in office may be predictive of scandal involvement, but so might holding a leadership position. If I were to find that members who took Congressional leadership positions (or, perhaps, served on some of the committees that dole out resources, like Appropriations) were more likely to become involved in scandal than those who did not, this would provide further evidence that greater levels of power lead to a greater likelihood of abusing that power.

Additionally, I could also plausibly add additional information to the survival models. One possible predictor of incumbents being more likely to lose their seats is the state of the economy. When the economy is robust (as it was during Clinton’s presidency), voters may be less likely to want to “throw the bums out.” My database was entirely composed of incumbents, and I used a time-in-office measure to account for differences among members as predictors of survival. However, some members may be more vulnerable than others, based on redistricting changes or on voter margins in their own region. I could add measures to indicate if the election following the scandal was one that took place after redistricting, as well as measures of how wide the member’s prior vote total was. The inclusion of both of these measures would allow for more robust testing of the survival models.

The consistent finding that situational factors seem to trump individual findings with regards to the likelihood of scandal occurring and the prospects of a politician’s survival, deserves more elucidation. In many ways, as I suggested in Chapter 3, the most

148 suggestive personality traits (like narcissism, arrogance, or ambition), may not differ largely among elected politicians to lead to any differences in expected outcomes. In other words, all federal politicians, by virtue of holding public office, will be likely to score high on any objective measures of these traits. However, work completed by scholars interested in the personality facets of leadership also suggests that even though these personality traits can be predictive of some outcomes, political outcomes are largely predicted by situational factors (Simonton 1988, Simonton 1986). Interestingly, and tellingly, the personality factors that did predict outcomes all predicted perceptions of presidential greatness, not actual political outcomes. In other words, even though people might perceive politicians as differing wildly in personality traits and base their assessment’s greatness on those personality traits, the things that make a great president are largely beyond his or her control.

Connecting this to scandal, we might anticipate that similar processes are occurring. Even though some politicians can be perceived as more or less honest or more or less narcissistic, it remains an open question whether those personality traits actually have any bearing on whether or not a scandal occurs – and this dissertation preliminarily suggests that situational factors may matter more.

One of the most surprising null findings was the nonexistent role gender played in scandal involvement and scandal survival. When looking solely at US

Congressmembers, women are no more or less likely to become involved in scandal.

This runs counter to expectations based on the finding that areas with higher numbers of women in government tend to have lower levels of corruption. However, I believe both

149 findings can be true simultaneously. Most of the work on women in government has been explored in a comparative setting; e.g., what factors may lead one country to have a higher level of corruption than another. A country where a higher percentage of women sit in elected office may indeed have lower levels of corruption, even if those women may be no more or less likely than their male counterparts to engage in corrupt or scandalous behaviors. Two factors can contribute to this possibility. First, the macro- level factors explored in comparative studies of corruption may be only weakly correlated with the behaviors identified as scandalous in the modern United States. Corruption, measured largely as government inefficiency and the presence of bribery, may decrease as women enter office, but for factors unrelated to the presence of women themselves, as

Sung (2003) argues. The second factor contributing to the null gender finding could be one of group behaviors versus the behavior of one individual woman. A government with a group of women controlling the distribution of resources may rely on group dynamics, whereas one woman operating in a given context may be removed from those group dynamics.

It is also possible that, simply, female politicians are just no more “pure” or

“clean” than male politicians and that expectations to the contrary are based on stereotypes and misleading reporting. During the 2013 government shutdown debate, female Senators were hailed in the media as the factor that finally turned the tide and led to negotiations. In a Time magazine article, reporter Jane Newton-Small described a late- night “pizza” session held by most of the Senate’s female members as being the straw

150 that broke the camel’s back20. However, the arguments were largely based on anecdotal evidence and quotes from the Senators’ staff. Women bucking the “old boys club” and being more efficient, above-the-fray, and ultimately better legislators is a compelling narrative, but this does not necessarily mean that it is true, and it certainly does not mean that women are less likely to be involved in the darker, seedier side of government.

The finding that women are no less likely to be involved in scandal leads me to another discussion: norms for politician behavior vary depending on the member and the region the member represents. In the time period covered by 1975-2010, norms for what is considered to be appropriate politician behavior may have shifted. On the one hand, it may well be the case that voters are more tolerant of sexual misconduct, particularly, but on the other hand, John F. Kennedy was widely considered to be an adulterer and his misdeeds were largely ignored. The details surrounding JFK’s scandals were much less graphic than those surrounding Clinton’s, however. Again, although Americans may like to bemoan the decay of American morality, it does not appear as though Americans are any more or less sensitive to certain types of scandals now, compared to thirty years ago.

More research would need to be completed – do survival rates for sex scandals vary over time? Or, perhaps individual Americans would now be indifferent to the types of scandals that generated uproar in 1975. Just from a perusal of the database, this does not seem likely. However, it does seem possible that as the private life of the politician has started to deteriorate, and as formerly private behaviors are now more likely to be known by the public, Americans may be seen as more “forgiving” of certain behaviors, but this is

20 http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/16/women-are-the-only-adults-left-in-washington/

151 mostly an artifact of the fact that those behaviors used to fall squarely in the private sphere, and that private sphere just doesn’t exist anymore.

Although I am skeptical that norms for politician behavior matter a great deal here, I do think that cultural differences play a large part in the lifecycle of a scandal. As

I discussed in Chapter 2, certain regions of the US have been known for the presence of dirty politics for decades. In those settings, culture might matter. If certain behaviors are just seen as the norm for politicians in that area, those behaviors might not lead to scandal. However, cultural norms can shift. What might be seen as normal in 1920s

Boston is not likely to be seen as normal in 1990s Boston, and in that period political actors and their constituencies likely navigated through normative change. This change might come after some precipitating event, like a massive corruption ring being brought to light. For example, after a period of major scandal in New Jersey in the early 21st

Century, the state implemented much more stringent watchdog policies. The reason this particular period of scandal was more consequential than the other scandals in New

Jersey was that the federal government was involved, thereby highlighting the disconnect between the state’s political culture and national political culture. These sorts of events can shift the political culture, resulting in a climate that is more hostile to certain types of scandal, and less to others. In a country the size of the United States, there are many places where what is scandalous in one region may not be scandalous in others, but for the US Congress, these differences may be mute, as the behaviors for members are more uniform. In short: culture may matter, but across states, and scandals can still occur regardless of cultural context.

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One noticeable absence from this dissertation is any meaningful test for media effects. The media may play a critical role in the production of scandal, but I was unable to account for its presence in this dissertation. In the creation of my scandal database, I relied on media reports of scandal, so the presence or absence of a scandal in that database was largely determined by whether it received national coverage. However, given that scandal is nearly impossible without media coverage, I do not think that the possibility of selection bias is terribly problematic. That being said, it is possible that the ebbs and flows in media coverage are indeed influenced by media famine and feast, as suggested by Nyhan (2011).

Were this dissertation to be expanded, I would attempt to better study the media’s role in scandal. Ideally, I would be able to identify the first moment the scandal broke, and the news source that broke it, and for how long the news source covered the scandal.

These measures would allow me to identify both the magnitude of the scandal, as well as allow me to correlate the presence of scandal reporting with measures of media famine.

By doing so, this will allow me to better pinpoint the true cause of scandal – are they borne of media boredom and the politician being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or are they reactive to changes in the political climate and election season, as my findings here suggest? I would also be better able to assign magnitude values to the scandals, which could be a useful measure that could be potentially related to the politician’s survival likelihood.

Additionally, I would hope to code the coverage for content. To better explore the mechanism behind why we see more scandals in election years, I could identify

153 whether the media covered mentioned the name of the politician’s election opponent.

The presence of the election opponent in the scandal article could be a sign that the media were simply paying more attention to the politician’s misdeeds because they were running for reelection, not that the scandal was uncovered for other reasons – although this is an imperfect measure.

Variations in the way the scandal was covered could also be significant for survival and public evaluation studies. Coverage that highlights uncertainty about whether the scandal took place or not could plausibly be related to the survival of the politician – ambiguity about the certainty of the misdeed might influence the willingness of the politician’s constituents to alter their attitudes about the politician. Furthermore, the overall tone of the coverage could also be coded and measured; more negative coverage could indicate both a higher level of public outrage or a stronger scandal (or, likely, both). Again, variations in tone could be related to survival.

It is possible to experimentally manipulate media coverage as well. In my experiment, I intentionally kept the moral frame of the scandal weak. I did not include any intentional activation of the scandal in the news article, but rather assumed that the scandal type itself would serve as that activator. Given my findings, it is possible that purity is more easily activated than the other moral foundations. A simple manipulation, like calling the politician’s behavior “unfair” or “harmful” could activate the moral reasoning and lead to differences in politician evaluation based on that reasoning. This could contribute to the literature on moral reasoning itself; if the scandal is presented in moral terms, perhaps even individuals who do not believe that foundation to be important

154 may find the moral arguments more persuasive than were the scandal to be presented in another way.

Final Thoughts:

Taken together, my findings suggest that scandals in a Westernized democracy like the United States, are more likely to arise in situations where politicians have greater access to power, although more research is required to verify this finding and to further engage the causal arguments. Still, at this stage, the implications of this are numerous.

To a large extent, scandals can be seen of as indicative of networks of corruption

(although not in all cases). Although it would be possible to reduce the number of scandals by encouraging the media to cover-up political malfeasance, the other way to reduce the number of publicized norm violations seems not to be to elect more honest politicians, but to check political power. An interesting test of this could be to explore the presence of scandals cross-nationally. In countries where the legislative body is seen as weaker, do we have fewer scandals?

The implications for US policy are complex. I do not find evidence that watchdog networks reduce the number of scandals; even if I were to find any statistically significant effect of scandal, I would be surprised if it was positive. One side effect of the presence of effective watchdogs is that they, by the nature of being effective, lead to scandals being made public, causing it to appear as though there are more scandals.

Given that unpublicized scandals are more-or-less unknowable, it would be challenging to see if watchdogs actually decrease corruption. However, it is possible that we could

155 identify variables that are symptomatic of corruption (like government waste, for example) and use those measures as a way to see the effectiveness of watchdogs.

Generally, as I argue, if voters can't be certain that a specific "type" of member is more or less likely to engage in corruption, but that all members are corruptible, it may make sense for policy changes to focus on the system, not the member. It appears as though organizations with higher levels of power are more likely to see scandal; limiting the amount of power any one organization might have could be one potential policy change that could reduce the number of scandals. Similarly, it is also possible that term limits could deter politicians from becoming too powerful, thereby reducing the number of scandals -- although, term limits themselves have other side effects. Term limits on leadership positions could be one other policy change designed to reduce scandal, as the acquisition of power might be tempered.

Essentially, it does not seem likely that any one policy shift would reduce the number of scandals in the United States, nor do I think that the abolition of scandal is a net “good.” Instead, scandals can serve as useful heuristics for the health of a democracy

– more scandals may mean that there is more corruption, or that individual attitudes towards politicians are changing, or that we simply have more effective ways of monitoring the behavior of our political representatives. My research suggests that access to power will always have a corrupting influence, and so I do not think that it is possible to fully squash that relationship. However, by designing a system where politicians do not stand to gain greatly from holding public office, a democracy may be

156 able to temper the more nefarious desires that attract some people to politics, thereby resulting in a cleaner, more accountable, government.

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Appendix A: Sources

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Lexis Nexis, the news source aggregator, provides full text from a variety of news sources. For the purposes of this dissertation, I attempted to identify a number of news sources which covered the majority of my time period (1975-2010) and had national reach. I also wanted to identify a number of news sources that covered both national and regional news. The sources I chose were my attempt to maximize reach while limiting redundancy, and are below.

Number of Time Period Scandals New York Times 1975-2010 87 Washington Post 1977-2010 42 Associated Press 1977-2010 137 Denver Post 1993-2010 11 St Louis Post Dispatch 1989-2010 45 Houston Chronicle 1987-2010 54 Seattle Post- Intelligencer 1986-2009 13 Atlanta Journal Constitution 1991-2010 27 Minneapolis Star Tribune 1991-2010 6 San Francisco Chronicle 1989-2010 5

Table A:1 Newspapers

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Appendix B: Coded Variables for Scandal Database

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Type of Scandal: The literature dealing with scandals does have examples of other scholars classifying scandals into categories. To some extent, the categories build themselves. Although all scandals are slightly different, these differences are far less notable than the similarities among scandals. Bribery, adultery, abusing the elected position for personal gain – these are the most common type of scandals, a finding which is in line with work by Peters and Welch, Basinger (2013) and Long (2013).

Abuse of Office: The most common type of scandal in this database is what Long

(2013) and I both call the “Abuse of Office” scandal. The classic example of this category of scandal is the House Bank Scandal. In this scandal, members took advantage of a privilege granted to them which allowed them to overdraft their Congressional bank accounts. All scandals similar to this were classified as “abuse of office” scandals.21

Bribery: Bribery is also a common occurrence in politics. Generally, bribery scandals involved an external party, like a lobbyist, attempting to buy access and influence policy in exchange for illegal donations to politicians. In other circumstances, independent contractors would give money to politicians who would be able to grant these contractors special, lucrative projects. Implicit in the bribery is the “tit for tat” relationship between the client and the politician.

Sex: Also common, sex scandals involve a politician engaging in an illicit, sexual, relationship with an individual, most often one who is not his or her spouse. Unmarried

21 In some cases, a scandal could fall into two categories. For example, members who engage in sexual relations with their interns are technically abusing their office, as access to interns is a consequence of serving in office. In situations where a scandal could be double coded, I picked the category that seemed to be the focus of the reporting of the scandal.

161 politicians can also become involved in sex scandals – the database does have examples of politicians engaging in sex with prostitutes, for example. I do not make firm judgments on the type of behavior that qualifies as “sex” – Bill Clinton may have argued about the classification of his own scandal, but regardless of one’s opinion about whether his activities constituted “sex,” his scandal would be counted as a sex scandal by my criteria.

Campaign Finance: Campaign finance violations are fairly common, but campaign finance scandals are less so. To be classified as a campaign finance scandal, the event needed to involve an already-elected politician intentionally attempting to circumvent campaign finance law, most commonly to take in more money than is allowed by law. As is the case with all of the scandals here, the event also needed to be identified as a scandal by the mainstream media.

Unsavory Behavior: On occasion, a politician would behave in a manner unbecoming of an elected official, but this behavior is not necessarily bribery, abuse of office, or a traditional sex scandal. The most common example here is a politician driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Violence: Politics can get heated, and on occasion it has driven politicians to blows. For the small number of scandals that fall into this category, I employ a relatively liberal definition of violence which includes threats on another person. State representative Bob Johnson (R-Minn) once verbally threatened another individual when that person would not fly him to a funeral. Cases of rape I classify as “sex” scandals, while cases of domestic violence I classify here.

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Sexism/Racism: In all likelihood, many politicians hold sexist or racist attitudes.

Uttering those attitudes in a public place is occasionally classified as a scandal. Trent

Lott resigned from his leadership position in the US Senate after praising Strom

Thurmond’s failed presidential bid, during which he ran as a segregationist. This type of event is classified as a sexism/racism scandal.

Lying and Stealing: These are two separate categories, but they are similar in several ways. Both involve the politician intending to deceive other people, and neither fits neatly into any other category. Bribery often involves cover-up attempts, but to be classified as a “Lying” scandal, the politician more often lies in order to mislead the public about some personal characteristic.

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Appendix C: List of Scandals

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Starting Name Broad Category Year Daniel Brewster Bribery 1969 John Connally Bribery 1974 Hugh Carey Abuse of office 1975 Albert Blumenthal Abuse of office 1975 Hugh Scott Bribery 1975 John Bailey Bribery 1975 Frank Mazzei Stealing 1975 Henry Helstoski Bribery 1975 Otto Passman Bribery 1975 Hal Dekio Campaign Finance 1975 David McCain Campaign Finance 1975 James Atkins Campaign Finance 1975 Brendan Byrne Campaign Finance 1975 Joseph DiCarlo Bribery 1976 Allan Howe Sex 1976 Andrew Hinshaw Bribery 1976 Wayne Hays Sex 1976 Ronald MacKenzie Bribery 1976 Frank Fasi Bribery 1976 Robert Leggett Sex 1976 Robert L F Sikes Bribery 1976 Ray Blanton Bribery 1977 Marvin Mandel Abuse of office 1977 Wilbur Mills Sex 1977 Samuel Smith Bribery 1977 Harold Maurice Unsavory behavior 1977 Joseph Montoya Bribery 1977 Birch Bayh Bribery 1977 John McFall Bribery 1977 John Young Sex 1977 Richard A Tonry Voter Fraud 1977 Richard Hanna Bribery 1977 Tennyson Guyer Bribery 1977 John Brademas Bribery 1977 Edward Derwinski Bribery 1977 George Moscone Bribery 1978

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Monte Geralds Stealing 1978 Charles Diggs Abuse of office 1978 John Rarick Lying 1978 Edward Brooke Lying 1978 Joshua Eilberg Bribery 1978 Nick Galifanakis Lying 1978 Daniel Flood Abuse of office 1978 Ella Grasso Abuse of office 1978 George Rogers Bribery 1978 David Pryor Abuse of office 1978 Edward Patten Bribery 1978 Edward Roybal Bribery 1978 Herman Talmadge Abuse of office 1979 Dennis Kucinich Abuse of office 1979 David Friedman Bribery 1979 Michael Myers Bribery 1980 Howard Cannon Abuse of office 1980 John Jenrette Bribery 1980 Robert Bauman Unsavory behavior 1980 John Murphy Bribery 1980 Angelo Errichetti Bribery 1980 Richard Kelly Bribery 1980 Charles Wilson Bribery 1980 Jon Hinson Unsavory behavior 1980 Harrison Williams Jr. Bribery 1980 John Larkins Bribery 1980 Raymond Lederer Bribery 1980 John Murtha Bribery 1980 Billy Clayton Bribery 1980 James Hunt Abuse of office 1981 Alcee Hastings bribery 1981 Jesse Helms Unsavory behavior 1981 James D. Tew Bribery 1981 Joe Wyatt Sex 1982 Kevin White Abuse of office 1982 George Hohman Jr Bribery 1982 Frederick Richmond Unsavory behavior 1982 Frederick Richmond Sex 1982 Jerry Apodoca bribery 1982 Larry Craig Sex 1982 Harry Eugene Claiborne Abuse of office 1983

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Daniel Crane Sex 1983 Arch Moore, Jr Abuse of office 1984 Inadequate George Hanson disclosure 1984 James Traficant bribery 1984 John Thomas Lying 1985 William Brennan bribery 1985 John Jordan Bribery 1985 Barney Frank Bribery 1985 Randy Staten Stealing 1986 Walter Nixon Lying 1986 Bobbi Fiedler bribery 1986 William Boner bribery 1986 Byron Dorgan Abuse of office 1986 Marion Barry Abuse of office 1986 Bill Clements Abuse of office 1987 Austin Murphy Abuse of office 1987 Peter Babalas Abuse of Office 1987 Evan Meecham Abuse of office 1987 Buddy Leach Abuse of office 1987 Fernand St German Abuse of office 1987 Clarence Mitchell III Bribery 1987 Michael Mitchell Bribery 1987 Mario Biaggi bribery 1987 Gerdi Lipschutz Abuse of Office 1987 Donald Sproul Campaign violations 1987 Bob Davis Bribery 1987 Rudy Boschwitz Sexism/Racism 1987 Harold Ford, Sr Bribery 1987 Joe Biden Lying 1987 Pat Swindall Lying 1988 Bill Chappell Abuse of office 1988 Joe DioGuardi Bribery 1988 Jim Bates Sex 1988 Ernie Konnyu Sex 1988 Donald George Gaffney Bribery 1988 Frank Hill Bribery 1988 Robert Garcia Bribery 1988 Mary Rose Oakar Abuse of office 1988 Paul Carpenter Bribery 1988 Steven Cobb Sex 1989

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Alan Cranston Abuse of office 1989 Frank Annunzio Abuse of office 1989 Denny Smith Abuse of office 1989 Charles Pashayan Abuse of office 1989 Dan Tonkovich Bribery 1989 Jeff Conway Stealing 1989 Larry Tucker Bribery 1989 Tony Coehlo Abuse of office 1989 Joseph Montoya Bribery 1989 John "Si" Boettner Tax Evasion 1989 Donald Lukens Sex 1989 John McCain Abuse of office 1989 Gus Savage Sex 1989 Alfonse D'Amato Abuse of office 1989 Dennis DeConcini Abuse of office 1989 Marion Barry Jr Sex 1990 David Durenberger Abuse of office 1990 Donald Riegle Abuse of office 1990 Albert Bustamante Bribery 1990 Jim Bates Abuse of office 1990 Stan Parris Sexism/Racism 1990 Arlan Stangeland Abuse of office 1990 Luther Taylor Bribery 1990 Robert Brown Bribery 1990 Robert Kohn Bribery 1990 Daniel Winstead Bribery 1990 Richard Lee Bribery 1990 Roy Dyson Lying 1990 Dewey Crump Unsavory behavior 1990 Terry Sanford Abuse of office 1991 Jim Thompson Abuse of office 1991 Carolyn Walker Voter Fraud 1991 Dionne Halverson Stealing 1991 Antonio Almeida Bribery 1991 Clarence Thomas Sex 1991 Ronald Olguin Bribery 1991 Jeb Bush Sex 1991 Frederick Lippman Abuse of Office 1991 John Glenn Abuse of office 1991 Chris Perkins Abuse of office 1992 Tommy Robinson Abuse of office 1992

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Edward Feighan Abuse of office 1992 Jim Scheuer Abuse of office 1992 Ronald Coleman Abuse of office 1992 Robert Mrazek Abuse of office 1992 Ed Towns Abuse of office 1992 Bob Davis Abuse of office 1992 William Goodling Abuse of office 1992 Ronny Layman Bribery 1992 Gib Lewis Abuse of office 1992 William Clay Abuse of office 1992 Dan Quayle Sexism/Racism 1992 John Hall Bribery 1992 Doug Bosco Abuse of office 1992 Nicholas Mavroules Abuse of office 1992 Doug Walgren Abuse of office 1992 Joseph Early Abuse of office 1992 Bill McBee Bribery 1992 Charles Hayes Abuse of office 1992 Charles Hatcher Abuse of office 1992 Mickey Edwards Abuse of office 1992 Stephen Solarz Abuse of office 1992 Sammy Nunez Bribery 1992 Bill Alexander Abuse of office 1992 Brock Adams Sex 1992 Jerry Bronger Bribery 1992 Tony Coehlo Abuse of office 1992 John Conyers Abuse of office 1992 Butch Otter Unsavory behavior 1992 Richard Gephardt Campaign Finance 1992 Mary Rose Oakar Abuse of office 1992 Harold Ford Abuse of office 1992 Charles Wilson Abuse of office 1992 Bob Griffin Bribery 1992 Inadequate Mark Hatfield disclosure 1992 Joseph McDade Campaign Finance 1992 Lawrence Smith Campaign Finance 1993 Jon Lindsay Bribery 1993 Joe Hammill Sexism/Racism 1993 Evan Meecham Campaign Finance 1993 John Thoma Bribery 1993

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Carol Moseley Braun Campaign Finance 1993 Arch Moore, Jr Abuse of office 1993 Joe Hammill Abuse of Office 1993 Virgil Pearman Campaign Finance 1993 Thomas Fey Abuse of office 1993 David LeMaster Bribery 1993 Alan Welle Abuse of Office 1993 Pat Nolan Bribery 1993 Alan Robbins Bribery 1993 Bill Strong Campaign Finance 1993 John Rogers Bribery 1993 Kay Bailey Hutchinson Abuse of office 1993 Paul Coverdell Abuse of Office 1993 Bob Bullock Sexism/Racism 1993 Jon Kyl Abuse of Office 1993 Bob Graham Abuse of Office 1993 Nancy Johnson Abuse of Office 1993 Dee Long Abuse of office 1993 Jimmy Benefield Unsavory behavior 1993 Sam Solon Abuse of Office 1993 Dominic Jacobetti Abuse of Office 1993 Theo Mitchell Tax Evasion 1994 Charles Robb Spying 1994 Charles Robb Unsavory behavior 1994 Alan Wheat Bribery 1994 Dan Rostenkowski Abuse of office 1994 Walter Tucker III Bribery 1994 Mel Reynolds Sex 1994 Bob Packwood Sex 1994 Landon Sexton Campaign Finance 1994 Bill Campbell Bribery 1994 Christine Todd Whitman Voter Fraud 1994 Enid Greene Campaign Finance 1995 Mike Lowrey Sex 1995 Kevin Chandler Violence 1995 Gerry Hinton Bribery 1995 Hank Lauricella Bribery 1995 Bob Johnson Violence 1995 Richard Turner Stealing 1995 BB Rayburn Bribery 1995 Larry Bankston Bribery 1995

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Barbara-Rose Collins Campaign Finance 1995 Helen Garrett Bribery 1995 Jim 'Guy' Tucker Abuse of office 1995 Edgar Ruiz Bribery 1995 Clay Crupper Bribery 1995 Lorraine Hine Abuse of office 1995 Newt Gingrich Abuse of office 1995 Don Blandford Bribery 1995 Art Schmidt Bribery 1995 Marc Gaspard Abuse of office 1995 John Alario Bribery 1995 Pete Wilson Unsavory behavior 1995 Patti Weaver Abuse of office 1995 Joe King Abuse of office 1995 Phil Gramm Unsavory behavior 1995 Clyde Ballard Abuse of office 1995 Sid Snyder Abuse of office 1995 Brian Ebersole Abuse of office 1995 Wes Cooley Lying 1996 Jerry Costello Abuse of office 1996 Edwin Edwards Bribery 1996 Jeff Bertram Campaign violations 1996 Edwin Edwards Bribery 1996 Carol Moseley Braun Abuse of office 1996 Jay Kim Campaign Finance 1996 Charles Flaherty Tax Evasion 1996 Robert Torricelli Bribery 1996 Newt Gingrich Abuse of office 1996 Richard Gephardt Campaign violations 1996 Richard Gephardt Campaign Finance 1996 Bud Shuster Abuse of office 1996 Jim Edgar Abuse of office 1997 Dan Burton Bribery 1997 Larry Young Abuse of Office 1997 Bill Burlison Sex 1997 Fife Symington Lying 1997 Fife Symington Bribery 1997 Robert Collins Bribery 1997 James Heiple Abuse of office 1997 JC Watts Campaign Finance 1997 Richard M Daley Abuse of office 1997

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Jerry Costello Abuse of office 1997 Tom Delay Unsavory behavior 1997 Pate Philip Bribery 1997 Terry Coleman Campaign Finance 1997 Ralph David Abernathy III Abuse of office 1998 Ralph David Abernathy III Unsavory Behavior 1998 Joseph Kennedy Unsavory behavior 1998 Gilbert Serna Sex 1998 Alberto Gutman Stealing 1998 Jeff Johnson Bribery 1998 Jim Wright Abuse of office 1998 Henry Stallings Abuse of Office 1998 Sheila Jackson Lee Sexism/Racism 1998 Mike Madigan Abuse of office 1998 Roy Romer Sex 1998 Helen Chenoweth Sex 1998 Dan Burton Sex 1998 Henry Hyde Sex 1998 George Ryan Bribery 1999 Bob Livingston Sex 1999 Nick Wilson Bribery 1999 Kirk Fordice Sex 1999 Gary Locke Campaign Finance 1999 Rod Grams Campaign violations 2000 Diana Harvey Johnson Abuse of Office 2000 Rudy Giuliani Sex 2000 Edgardo Rosario Burgos Stealing 2000 David Brock Lying 2000 Doug Dean Unsavory behavior 2001 David Jaye Unsavory behavior 2001 James Traficant Abuse of office 2001 Florian Chmielewski Abuse of office 2001 Tom Evans Unsavory behavior 2001 Gary Condit Sex 2001 Tom Railsback Unsavory behavior 2001 Brian Burke Bribery 2002 Vincent Cianci Bribery 2002 Ken Bentsen Unsavory behavior 2002 Steve Jensen Abuse of office 2002

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Chuck Chvala Abuse of office 2002 Steve Foti Abuse of office 2002 Paul Patton Sex 2002 Kwame Kilpratick Unsavory Behavior 2003 Kwame Kilpratick Violence 2003 Bill Janklow Violence 2003 Michael Garson Lying 2003 David Fuller Unsavory behavior 2003 Jaime Capelo Bribery 2003 Ed Schrock Sex 2004 John Norquist Sex 2004 Robert Torricelli Campaign Finance 2004 Craig Benson Abuse of Office 2004 Donald Siegelman Bribery 2004 Charles Walker Abuse of office 2004 Beverly Masek Bribery 2004 Neil Goldschmidt Sex 2004 James McGreevey Sex 2004 John Rowland Abuse of Office 2004 John Kerns Abuse of Office 2004 Gene Chandler Campaign Finance 2004 John Conyers Abuse of office 2004 Mario Gallegos Sex 2004 Pedro Rossello Abuse of Office 2004 Jim McDermott Unsavory behavior 2004 John Kerry Sex 2004 Bill Frist Abuse of Office 2005 Rod Blagojavich Bribery 2005 Rodolpho Delgado Abuse of Office 2005 Ernie Fletcher Abuse of Office 2005 Katherine Harris Bribery 2005 Don Sherwood Sex 2005 Kathryn Bowers Bribery 2005 Dick Murphy Bribery 2005 Bob Ney Bribery 2005 Chris Newton Bribery 2005 Randy Cunningham Bribery 2005 Trent Lott Sexism/Racism 2005 Tom Delay Bribery 2005 Wade Crutchfield Bribery 2005 John Ford Bribery 2005

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Dwayne Dobbins Sex 2005 Bob Taft Bribery 2005 Ray Miller Abuse of Office 2005 Richard M Daley Abuse of office 2005 Tom Anderson Bribery 2006 Bruce Weyrauch Bribery 2006 John Cowdery Bribery 2006 Wayne Bryant Abuse of office 2006 Pete Kott Bribery 2006 Pete Domenici Abuse of office 2006 George Allen Sexism/Racism 2006 Sue Kelly Abuse of Office 2006 Richard Pombo Bribery 2006 Efrain Gonzalez Abuse of office 2006 Virgil Goode Sexism/Racism 2006 Cynthia McKinney Violence 2006 Inadequate Alan Mollohan disclosure 2006 Deanna Hanna Bribery 2006 Rafael Arza Unsavory behavior 2006 Mark Foley Sex 2006 Vic Kohring Bribery 2006 Jeff Miller Bribery 2006 Dan Sutton Sex 2006 Inadequate Harry Reid disclosure 2006 Don Young Bribery 2006 Jim Gibbons Sex 2006 Diane Gordon Bribery 2006 Patrick Kennedy Unsavory Behavior 2006 William Jefferson Bribery 2006 Dennis Hastert Abuse of Office 2006 Gerry Studds Sex 2006 Arlen Specter Abuse of Office 2006 Sam Adams Sex 2007 L Harvey Smith Bribery 2007 Ben Nighthorse Campbell Abuse of office 2007 Thomas Wright Campaign Finance 2007 Ted Stevens Bribery 2007 Heather Wilson Abuse of office 2007 Lisa Murkowski Abuse of office 2007

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Louis Manzo Bribery 2007 Daniel Van Pelt Bribery 2007 John Bowman Stealing 2007 Rick Renzi Abuse of office 2007 Gerald Garson Bribery 2007 Joe Stengel Abuse of office 2007 Glenn Richardson Sex 2007 Inadequate Terri Hodge disclosure 2007 Michael Walker Abuse of Office 2007 Louis DeLuca Violence 2007 Larry Craig Sex 2007 Larry Manzanares Stealing 2007 Eliot Spitzer Spying 2007 Antonio Villaraigosa Sex 2007 David Vitter Sex 2007 Gavin Newsom Sex 2007 Bob Filner Violence 2007 John Atkins Violence 2007 Jim Gibbons Bribery 2007 Roland Burris Abuse of office 2008 David Patterson Sex 2008 Inadequate Matt Blunt disclosure 2008 Thomas Reynolds Bribery 2008 Chip Pickering Sex 2008 Vito Fosella Unsavory Behavior 2008 John Doolittle Bribery 2008 Kit Bond Abuse of office 2008 Rod Blagojavich Abuse of office 2008 Michael Conahan Bribery 2008 Thomas Porteus Lying 2008 Tim Mahoney Sex 2008 Norm Coleman Abuse of office 2008 Douglas Bruce Violence 2008 Dianne Wilkerson Bribery 2008 Kent Conrad Abuse of office 2008 Eliot Spitzer Sex 2008 Kwame Kilpratick Abuse of Office 2008 Kwame Kilpratick Tax Evasion 2008 Michael Garcia Sex 2008

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Mark Ciavarella Bribery 2008 Joseph Bruno Abuse of office 2008 Sam Kent Sex 2008 Sarah Palin Abuse of Office 2008 Charles Rangel Abuse of Office 2008 Paul Green Campaign Finance 2008 Sam Hoyt Sex 2008 Bill Deweese Abuse of office 2008 John Murtha Bribery 2009 Manuel Barazza Sex 2009 Bobby DeLaughter Bribery 2009 Cletus Maricle Bribery 2009 Adrian Fenty Abuse of office 2009 Sheila Dixon Lying 2009 Jeff Smith Lying 2009 Mike Duvall Sex 2009 Salvatore DiMasi Bribery 2009 Talibdin El-Amin Bribery 2009 Ray Sansom Stealing 2009 John Ensign Sex 2009 Phillip Hamilton Abuse of office 2009 Galen Fox Sex 2009 Paul Stanley sex 2009 James Marzilli Sex 2009 Manny Aragon Stealing 2009 David Vitter Violence 2009 Mark Sanford Sex 2009 Gregory Meeks Unsavory behavior 2009 Jesse Jackson JR Abuse of office 2009 Peter Visclosky Bribery 2009 Chris Dodd Abuse of office 2009 David Patterson Abuse of Office 2010 Kino Flores Abuse of office 2010 Hiram Monseratt Violence 2010 Ted Strickland Abuse of Office 2010 Pedro Espada Jr Stealing 2010 Carolyn Kirkpatrick Unsavory Behavior 2010 Eric Massa Sex 2010 Nathan Deal Abuse of office 2010 Rick Perry Abuse of office 2010 Ulysses Currie Bribery 2010

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Maxine Waters Abuse of office 2010 Eddie Bernice Johnson Abuse of Office 2010 Sanford Bishop JR Abuse of office 2010

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Appendix D: Devices

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Figure D:1 Sample Device Treatment

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Republican, Fairness Des Moines, IA: Republican State Senator Mark Wilson is in hot water after recent allegations surfaced that he has been exchanging powerful positions on State committees in exchange for favors. State Investigator Chris Toomey, speaking with the Herald, describes what he calls “compelling” evidence that Wilson overlooked more-qualified candidates for important state positions in favor of individuals who donated to his campaign or promised to vote for him in the next election. One of the spurned applicants for the citizen-advisory position on the House Finance Committee, Edward Barnes, has 35 years of experience in state financial policy and a Master in Accounting from the University of Chicago. He was also a vocal critic of Wilson’s last campaign. He says his outspokenness lost him his seat, which was given to Jack Fox, a local music teacher who has no background in finance. Fox donated to Wilson’s campaign, and appears in a local advertisement for Wilson’s upcoming primary election. “Something doesn’t look right here,” Toomey told the Herald when asked about the situation. “Barnes was considered the runaway choice for the position, and to have that seat go to an outsider with no experience in Legislative Finance appears questionable.” Senator Wilson’s office could not be reached for comment. Democrat, Fairness Des Moines, IA: Democratic State Senator Mark Wilson is in hot water after recent allegations surfaced that he has been exchanging powerful positions on State committees in exchange for favors. State Investigator Chris Toomey, speaking with the Herald, describes what he calls “compelling” evidence that Wilson overlooked more-qualified candidates for important state positions in favor of individuals who donated to his campaign or promised to vote for him in the next election. One of the spurned applicants for the citizen-advisory position on the House Finance Committee, Edward Barnes, has 35 years of experience in state financial policy and a Master in Accounting from the University of Chicago. He was also a vocal critic of Wilson’s last campaign. He says his outspokenness lost him his seat, which was given to Jack Fox, a local music teacher who has no background in finance. Fox donated to Wilson’s campaign, and appears in a local advertisement for Wilson’s upcoming primary election.

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“Something doesn’t look right here,” Toomey told the Herald when asked about the situation. “Barnes was considered the runaway choice for the position, and to have that seat go to an outsider with no experience in Legislative Finance appears questionable.” Senator Wilson’s office could not be reached for comment. Judge, Fairness Des Moines, IA State Supreme Court Justice Mark Wilson is in hot water after recent allegations surfaced that he has been exchanging powerful positions on State advisory boards in exchange for favors. State Investigator Chris Toomey, speaking with the Herald, describes what he calls “compelling” evidence that Wilson overlooked more-qualified candidates for important state positions in favor of individuals who donated to his campaign or promised to vote for him in the next election. One of the spurned applicants for the citizen-advisory position on the State Campaign Finance Board, Edward Barnes, has 35 years of experience in state financial policy and a Master in Accounting from the University of Chicago. He was also a vocal critic of Wilson’s last campaign. He says his outspokenness lost him his seat, which was given to Jack Fox, a local music teacher who has no background in finance. Fox donated to Wilson’s campaign, and appears in a local advertisement for Wilson’s upcoming election. “Something doesn’t look right here,” Toomey told the Herald when asked about the situation. “Barnes was considered the runaway choice for the position, and to have that seat go to an outsider with no experience in campaign finance appears questionable.” Judge Wilson’s office could not be reached for comment. Republican, Harm Des Moines, IA: Republican Senator Mark Wilson is in hot water after allegations have surfaced that he physically abused his two children. Jane and Henry Wilson, now both in college, recently told the Gazette that Senator Wilson would violently punish them for infractions they made as children. “Sometimes, Dad would hit us when we would forget to do chores, or get a B on a homework assignment,” Henry explained. “We would have to wear long-sleeved shirts, even when it was warm, to cover the bruises.” The children attest that Senator Wilson’s punishments went far beyond the average spanking.

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“Now that I’m preparing to have my own kids, I realize how wrong Dad’s punishments were,” Jane told the Gazette. “We couldn’t stay silent any longer.” When asked why they didn’t come forward with their allegations earlier, Jane and Henry both said that they feared retribution from their father. “He’s a really powerful man,” Henry said. “I didn’t want him to hurt me or Jane again.” The younger Wilsons now both live in New York. Senator Wilson’s office refused to comment on this story. Democrat, Harm Des Moines, IA Democratic Senator Mark Wilson is in hot water after allegations have surfaced that he physically abused his two children. Jane and Henry Wilson, now both in college, recently told the Gazette that Senator Wilson would violently punish them for infractions they made as children. “Sometimes, Dad would hit us when we would forget to do chores, or get a B on a homework assignment,” Henry explained. “We would have to wear long-sleeved shirts, even when it was warm, to cover the bruises.” The children attest that Senator Wilson’s punishments went far beyond the average spanking. “Now that I’m preparing to have my own kids, I realize how wrong Dad’s punishments were,” Jane told the Gazette. “We couldn’t stay silent any longer.” When asked why they didn’t come forward with their allegations earlier, Jane and Henry both said that they feared retribution from their father. “He’s a really powerful man,” Henry said. “I didn’t want him to hurt me or Jane again.” The younger Wilsons now both live in New York. Senator Wilson’s office refused to comment on this story. Judge, Harm Des Moines, IA State Supreme Court Justice Mark Wilson is in trouble after allegations have surfaced that he physically abused his two children. Jane and Henry Wilson, now both in college, recently told the Gazette that Judge Wilson would violently punish them for infractions they made as children.

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“Sometimes, Dad would hit us when we would forget to do chores, or get a B on a homework assignment,” Henry explained. “We would have to wear long-sleeved shirts, even when it was warm, to cover the bruises.” The children attest that Judge Wilson’s punishments went far beyond the average spanking. “Now that I’m preparing to have my own kids, I realize how wrong Dad’s punishments were,” Jane told the Gazette. “We couldn’t stay silent any longer.” When asked why they didn’t come forward with their allegations earlier, Jane and Henry both said that they feared retribution from their father. “He’s a really powerful man,” Henry said. “I didn’t want him to hurt me or Jane again.” The younger Wilsons now both live in New York. Judge Wilson’s office refused to comment on this story.

Republican, Authority Springfield, MO: Questions have been raised at the State Capital yesterday after Republican Representative Tom Price of the Missouri House interrupted an elderly Senator during a speech today. Retiring Senator Edmund Burke gave his traditional farewell speech to a joint session of the House and Senate yesterday, but was interrupted by recently-elected Representative Tom Price, who appeared impatient with Sen. Burke’s speech. About 10 minutes into Burke’s speech, Price shouted “Hurry up, Old Man!” Senator Burke turned 87 last month. After being interrupted, Senator Burke had difficulty finishing his speech. He stuttered several times before hastily wrapping up the speech 10 minutes early. “Senator Burke was clearly shaken by the interruption,” commented Senate President John Crawford, adding that the Senate was not sure whether to censure Representative Price yet. Senator Burke’s office issued a statement that included the following: “Senator Burke is upset by the lack of decorum shown by Representative Price, but harbors no hard feelings.” The statement went on to express Senator Burkes’ pleasure at being able to serve the Senate for 44 years. Representative Price refused to comment on this story, and his office did not return calls.

Democrat, Authority

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Springfield, MO: Questions have been raised at the State Capital yesterday after Democratic Representative Tom Price of the Missouri House interrupted an elderly Senator during a speech today. Retiring Senator Edmund Burke gave his traditional farewell speech to a joint session of the House and Senate yesterday, but was interrupted by recently-elected Representative Tom Price, who appeared impatient with Sen. Burke’s speech. About 10 minutes into Burke’s speech, Price shouted “Hurry up, Old Man!” Senator Burke turned 87 last month. After being interrupted, Senator Burke had difficulty finishing his speech. He stuttered several times before hastily wrapping up the speech 10 minutes early. “Senator Burke was clearly shaken by the interruption,” commented Senate President John Crawford, adding that the Senate was not sure whether to censure Representative Price yet. Senator Burke’s office issued a statement that included the following: “Senator Burke is upset by the lack of decorum shown by Representative Price, but harbors no hard feelings.” The statement went on to express Senator Burkes’ pleasure at being able to serve the Senate for 44 years. Representative Price refused to comment on this story, and his office did not return calls.

Judge, Authority Springfield, MO: Questions have been raised at the State Capital yesterday after Missouri Supreme Court Judge Tom Price interrupted an elderly Judge during a speech today. Retiring Judge Edmund Burke gave his traditional farewell speech to the Court yesterday, but was interrupted by recently-elected Judge Price, who appeared impatient with Judge Burke’s speech. About 10 minutes into Burke’s speech, Price shouted “Hurry up, Old Man!” Judge Burke turned 87 last month. After being interrupted, Judge Burke had difficulty finishing his speech. He stuttered several times, before hastily wrapping up the speech 10 minutes early. “Judge Burke was clearly shaken by the interruption,” commented Head Justice John Crawford, adding that the Court was not sure whether to censure Justice Price yet. Judge Burke’s office issued a statement that included the following: “Judge Burke is upset by the lack of decorum shown by Judge Price, but harbors no hard feelings.” The

184 statement went on to express Judge Burkes’ pleasure at being able to serve on the Court for 44 years. Judge Price refused to comment on this story, and his office did not return calls.

Republican, purity Annapolis, MD: Questions have been raised at the State Capital yesterday as Legislative Ethics investigators, acting on a confidential tip, uncovered a large collection of pornography in the office of Republican Representative Tom Price . The pornography, including several images depicting women engaging in sexual acts with animals, was found both stuffed into the Representative’s desk drawers and in unlocked files on his computer. Legislative Investigator Ryan Doogan told the Post that the confidential tip had come from a “reliable and concerned source,” who was worried that visitors to Price’s office would encounter the pornography collection. Price, like all state Representatives, frequently has constituent visitors in his office. “Based on the evidence, it is unlikely that Representative Cooper showed these images to any visitors,” said Doogan. He elaborated that this possibility is still unconfirmed, but that the Legislative Ethics office is taking all steps to assure that no one else will be shown the images. “We’re not counting anything out.” Doogan added. One of Price’s former staffers, who wished to remain anonymous, said that he had walked into Price’s office while the pictures were on the computer screen. He said that Price made no effort to close his browser and seemed unbothered by the interruption. Representative Price and his office staff refused to comment on this story.

Democrat, purity Annapolis, MD: Questions have been raised at the State Capital yesterday as Legislative Ethics investigators, acting on a confidential tip, uncovered a large collection of pornography in the office of Democratic Representative Tom Price . The pornography, including several images depicting women engaging in sexual acts with animals, was found both stuffed into the Representative’s desk drawers and in unlocked files on his computer.

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Legislative Investigator Ryan Doogan told the Post that the confidential tip had come from a “reliable and concerned source,” who was worried that visitors to Price’s office would encounter the pornography collection. Price, like all state Representatives, frequently has constituent visitors in his office. “Based on the evidence, it is unlikely that Representative Cooper showed these images to any visitors,” said Doogan. He elaborated that this possibility is still unconfirmed, but that the Legislative Ethics office is taking all steps to assure that no one else will be shown the images. “We’re not counting anything out.” Doogan added. One of Price’s former staffers, who wished to remain anonymous, said that he had walked into Price’s office while the pictures were on the computer screen. He said that Price made no effort to close his browser and seemed unbothered by the interruption. Representative Price and his office staff refused to comment on this story.

Judge, Purity Annapolis, MD: Questions have been raised at the State Capital yesterday as State Ethics investigators, acting on a confidential tip, uncovered a large collection of pornography in the office of Supreme Court Judge Tom Price. The pornography, including several images depicting women engaging in sexual acts with animals, was found both stuffed into the Judges’ desk drawers and in unlocked files on his computer. Investigator Ryan Doogan told the Post that the confidential tip had come from a “reliable and concerned source,” who was worried that visitors to Price’s office would encounter the pornography collection. Price, like all Supreme Court Justices, frequently has visitors in his office. “Based on the evidence, it is unlikely that Judge Cooper showed these images to any visitors,” said Doogan. He elaborated that this possibility is still unconfirmed, but that the Legislative Ethics office is taking all steps to assure that no one else will be shown the images. “We’re not counting anything out.” Doogan added. One of Price’s former staffers, who wished to remain anonymous, said that he had walked into Price’s office while the pictures were on the computer screen. He said that Price made no effort to close his browser and seemed unbothered by the interruption. Judge Price and his office staff refused to comment on this story.

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Appendix E: Experiment Questionnaire

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Gender: What is your gender? Female Male Would prefer not to answer

Age How old are you? ____

Race What is your race? White/Caucasian Black/African American Latino/Hispanic Asian/Asian American Native American/Pacific Islander Other ______Prefer not to answer

Interest Some people don't pay much attention to political campaigns. How about you? Would you say that you have been VERY MUCH INTERESTED, SOMEWHAT INTERESTED or NOT MUCH INTERESTED in the political campaigns so far this year? ------Very much interested Somewhat interested Not much interested

Income level What is your family’s total household income level? 0-14,999 15,000-34,999 35,000-49,999 50,000-64,999 65,000-84,999 over 85,000 a year

Trust

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Instructions: The next set of questions are concerned with your general views about social and political affairs. Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with each of the following statements. a. You can generally trust the people who run our government to do what is right. ---1------2------3------4------5------6------7--- strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree

b. Unless we keep a close watch on them, many of our elected officials will look out for special interests rather than for all the people. ---1------2------3------4------5------6------7--- strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree c. When our government leaders make statements to the American people on television or in newspapers, they are usually telling the truth. ---1------2------3------4------5------6------7--- strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree d. Quite a few people running our government are not as honest as the voters have a right to expect. ---1------2------3------4------5------6------7--- strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree e. Whatever its faults, the American form of government is still the best for us. ---1------2------3------4------5------6------7--- strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree f. There is not much about our form of government to be proud of.

---1------2------3------4------5------6------7--- strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree g. It may be necessary to make some major changes in our form of government to solve the problems facing our country. ---1------2------3------4------5------6------7---

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strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree

. I would rather live in our system of government than any other I can think of. ---1------2------3------4------5------6------7--- strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree

People like me don’t have any say about what the government does. ---1------2------3------4------5------6------7--- strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree j. If public officials are not interested in hearing what the people think, there is really no way to make them listen. ---1------2------3------4------5------6------7--- strongly somewhat somewhat strongly disagree disagree agree agree k. Generally speaking, do you believe that most people can be trusted, or can’t you be too careful in dealing with people? _____ most people can be trusted _____ you can’t be too careful in dealing with people

Knowledge: Instructions: Please answer the following questions to the best of your ability. Many people have trouble with these kinds of questions, so you shouldn’t worry if you do not know all, or many, of the answers. a. Who is the current vice-president of the United States? ______b. How much of a majority is required for the U.S. Senate and House to override a presidential veto? ______c. Which political party currently holds the majority (has the most members) in the U.S. House of Representatives? ______d. Which political party, Republican or Democrat, is more conservative?______e. Whose responsibility is it to determine whether a law is constitutional or not? ---1------2------3--- Congress President Supreme Court f. Who is the current Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives?______g. What job is currently held by John Roberts? ______

190 h. Who is the current majority leader of the U.S. Senate? ______i. Who is the current minority leader of the U.S. Senate? ______j. Overall, how interested are you in political and national affairs? ---1------2------3------4--- not at all slightly somewhat extremely interested interested interested interested

Party Identification

1) Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a REPUBLICAN, a DEMOCRAT, an INDEPENDENT, or what? 2) Would you call yourself a STRONG [Democrat/Republican] or a NOT VERY STRONG [Democrat/Republican]? 3) Do you think of yourself as CLOSER to the Republican Party or to the Democratic party?

Liberal/Conservative We hear a lot of talk these days about liberals and conservatives. Here is a seven-point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from extremely liberal to extremely conservative.

Where would you place YOURSELF on this scale, or haven't you thought much about this?

1------2------3------4------5------6------7 Very conservative Moderate Very liberal

Moral Foundations Questionnaire

Part 1. When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking? Please rate each statement using this scale:

[0] = not at all relevant (This consideration has nothing to do with my judgments of right and wrong) [1] = not very relevant [2] = slightly relevant [3] = somewhat relevant [4] = very relevant

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[5] = extremely relevant (This is one of the most important factors when I judge right and wrong)

______Whether or not someone suffered emotionally

______Whether or not some people were treated differently than others

______Whether or not someone’s action showed love for his or her country

______Whether or not someone showed a lack of respect for authority

______Whether or not someone violated standards of purity and decency

______Whether or not someone was good at math

______Whether or not someone cared for someone weak or vulnerable

______Whether or not someone acted unfairly

______Whether or not someone did something to betray his or her group

______Whether or not someone conformed to the traditions of society

______Whether or not someone did something disgusting

______Whether or not someone was cruel

______Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights

______Whether or not someone showed a lack of loyalty

______Whether or not an action caused chaos or disorder

______Whether or not someone acted in a way that God would approve of

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Part 2. Please read the following sentences and indicate your agreement or disagreement: [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Strongly Moderately Slightly Slightly Moderately Strongly disagree disagree disagree agree agree agree

______Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.

______When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone is treated fairly.

______I am proud of my country’s history.

______Respect for authority is something all children need to learn.

______People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed.

______It is better to do good than to do bad.

______One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal.

______Justice is the most important requirement for a society.

______People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done

something wrong.

______Men and women each have different roles to play in society.

______I would call some acts wrong on the grounds that they are unnatural.

______It can never be right to kill a human being.

______I think it’s morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor

children inherit nothing.

______It is more important to be a team player than to express oneself.

______If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer’s orders, I would obey anyway because that is my duty.

______Chastity is an important and valuable virtue.

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SHOW ARTICLE HERE What was the name of the Senator (Judge) in the previous story?

The next questions will have to do with the emotions you felt while reading the story. Do the actions of {Politician} make you feel: 1—Very angry 2 – A little angry 3 – Not angry at all

Do the actions of {Politician} make you feel: 1 – Very hateful 2 – A little hateful 3 – Not hateful at all

Do the actions of {Politician} make you feel: 1 – Very anxious 2 – A little anxious 3 – Not anxious at all

Do the actions of { Politician } make you feel 1 – Very scared 2 – A little scared 3 – Not scared at all

Do the actions of {Politician} make you feel: 1 – Very happy 2 – A little happy 3 – Not happy at all

Do the actions of {Politician} make you feel: 1 – Very proud 2 – A little proud 3 – Not proud at all

The next few questions will present a list of words and phrases people may use to describe political figures. For each, please tell me whether the word or phrase describes the politician you just read about.

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Think about {Name of Politician}. In your opinion, does the phrase 'he is [trait]' describe {Name of politician} extremely well, quite well, not too well, or not well at all?

Traits: Moral Really cares about people like you Knowledgeable Provides strong leadership Dishonest Intelligent Out of touch with ordinary people

If you happen to remember, what was the Party to which {Politician} belonged? Democrat Republican The article didn’t say I don’t remember

(For Judge Articles only) If you had to guess, what would you say the ideology of Judge (name) is? Very liberal Liberal Moderate Conservative Very Conservative Don’t know

How bothered by the Senator (Judge’s) actions are you? Very bothered Somewhat bothered A little bothered Not bothered at all

On a scale of 1-100, with an answer of 1 indicating that you have very cold feelings and 100 indicating that you have very warm feelings, how do you feel towards Senator (Judge) (name)?

_____

If you were eligible to vote for {Name} (skip this question for judge), would you do so? Yes, I would vote for him

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No, I would not vote for him I would need to know more about his policy positions

Some people are in the process of collecting the names of Americans who will support removing {name} from office. Would you be interested in adding your name to this list? If so, please click yes. If not, please continue on. Yes No, Thank you

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