Why do voters continue to support politicians embroiled in scandals? A study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explores this phenomenon, examining the role of rhetoric and partisan motives. The findings indicate that partisans are more likely to tolerate “aggravating” strategies — denying or justifying actions — rather than “mitigating” strategies — admitting wrongdoing and seeking reconciliation — when these strategies come from their party leaders.
Political figures frequently escape severe consequences despite facing serious allegations. The researchers were intrigued by the possibility that the way politicians frame their responses to scandals could significantly impact public support. They sought to test theories from impression management, which suggest that apologizing can reduce conflict, against theories of intergroup bias, which propose that people might resist apologies from their own group to avoid embarrassment and maintain a positive group image.
“I wish I could say we were responding to some big news event, but the truth is we were academics putting theories together,” said study author Pierce D. Ekstrom, an assistant professor of Political Science at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“On one hand, theories of impression management suggest that people can reduce interpersonal conflict by apologizing. On the other hand, theories of intergroup bias suggest that people might not like their group to apologize. So we were worried that voters might actually be incentivizing politicians to deny wrongdoing and escape accountability for their actions.”
“The idea was that politics is different from everyday life,” Ekstrom explained. “In everyday life, if I do something that negatively affects you, my best bet is to apologize (or at least concede that I did something wrong). If I deny that my actions had any negative effects, or start attacking you for blaming me, that’s going to aggravate the situation.”
“But when politicians do something wrong, their misbehavior is not just between two individual people. Sooner or later, it’s a conflict between the groups (usually the parties) that those people represent. To the extent that everyday partisans want their leaders to be advocates – to make them look good and help the team win – they might come to prefer those “aggravating” explanations for misbehavior to explanations that concede wrongdoing.”
The study involved three experiments conducted between 2013 and 2019, focusing on fictitious political scandals. Participants were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and those identifying as political independents were excluded from the analyses to focus on partisan reactions.
In the first experiment, 403 participants read a fictional news story about a high-ranking politician accused of misconduct. The researchers manipulated the politician’s party affiliation (Democrat or Republican) and the type of account (aggravating, mitigating, or none) they gave in response to the allegations. Participants were then asked to evaluate the politician based on various traits and their likelihood of supporting them.
The second study aimed to replicate the findings of the first and further examine the conditions under which aggravating accounts might be more effective. This time, 1,116 participants read about a politician accused of misconduct that either served their party’s goals or their personal gain. The researchers also varied the politician’s status within their party (high-status vs. low-status) to see if this influenced participant reactions.
In the final experiment, 1,771 participants evaluated a fictitious politician, Douglas Courser, who was described as being either critical to his party’s success or relatively unimportant. This study aimed to isolate whether the stakes of the politician’s re-election influenced participant support for aggravating accounts. The scandal scenarios involved criminal wrongdoing for personal gain, such as a drunk-driving cover-up, campaign finance fraud, or tax evasion.
Across all three studies, the results consistently showed that partisans were more likely to support politicians from their own party who used aggravating accounts to deny or justify their misconduct. Mitigating accounts that involved admitting wrongdoing did not significantly harm the politicians’ evaluations but were not as beneficial as aggravating accounts.
Aggravating accounts reduced the perception that the scandal would harm the party’s reputation, thereby enhancing the politician’s evaluations. This effect was significant even when the stakes were low, indicating that concerns about party image play a role.
“In the end, our results were not quite as discouraging as we’d expected,” Ekstrom told PsyPost. “We thought voters would punish politicians from their party for apologizing, but that didn’t happen. Instead, what we found was that partisans were willing to tolerate explanations for misconduct from members of their own party that they would otherwise find unpersuasive – explanations in which politicians said they felt no regret or derided the scandal as a partisan smear campaign, for example.”
“So, bottom line, we found that partisans aren’t adding incentives to deny wrongdoing, but their reactions indicate that politicians can get away with not apologizing if they don’t want to and if they don’t need to reach across the aisle for support. And few politicians fall into either of those categories.”
“What’s the average voter actually supposed to do with that information, though?” Ekstrom continued. “I think we need to be aware of this bias, and try to be honest with ourselves about what kinds of behavior we want in our leaders. We can try to prepare ourselves before a scandal hits (or at least before the details are fully revealed) with some idea of where we draw the line. Because we know that we are inclined to move the goalposts for the politicians on our side.”
“But honestly, I think this is a problem that politicians and the system can do a lot more to solve than the average voter. The problem is really there – or at least it is worst – when an individual politician’s political survival overlaps too much with the party’s own image and success. And the ways parties handle their primaries, the messages that party leaders put out (or don’t put out) to the media do a lot to shape that perception.”
But as with any study, there are some caveats to consider. the study focused on fictitious scandals involving male politicians presumed to be white, which may not capture the full spectrum of voter reactions to scandals involving women or people of color. Future research could explore the impact of these variables and examine real-world scenarios to validate the experimental findings. It would also be beneficial to investigate how long-term exposure to aggravating accounts affects voter behavior and political polarization.
“The politicians in our study and all of the scandals were fictitious,” Ekstrom noted. “That allowed us to experimentally manipulate features of the scandal, but it means that voters did not have much reason to feel strongly (positively or negatively) about the politicians they were evaluating. In the ‘real world,’ the biases we observed in our study might well be worse, at least for prominent politicians that partisans already have lots of reasons to love or hate.”
The study, “On the Defensive: Identity, Language, and Partisan Reactions to Political Scandal,” was authored by Pierce D. Ekstrom, Marti Hope Gonzales, Allison L. Williams, Elliot Weiner, and Rafael Aguilera.
