A Study of the Relationship Between Negative Partisanship and Scandal

• In Event: Persuading the Public

Abstract

Scandals continue to pervade modern political campaigns. A number of political candidates have seen their electoral aspirations come to an end due to allegations of sexual misconduct, financial impropriety, and abuses of power. Political researchers have not been remiss in studying the effect of scandal on candidate evaluation. Prior research has documented a negative effect for scandal involvement; however, this effect is not uniform and is varies according to individual-level predispositions (partisanship, knowledge, etc.). This work generally adopts a motivated reasoning perspective to argue that individuals evaluate scandal-ridden candidates differentially based on their assessment of the scandalous information. I continue in this tradition by examining the extent to which negative partisanship undergirds motivated reasoning testing the expectations from this argument using an experimental design with three samples: a sample of community adults, a student sample, and an online sample.

Author

• Beth Miller Vonnahme, University of Missouri, Kansas City