While corruption is widely disapproved of, some corrupt politicians continue to win elections. We tackle this paradox by examining the effects of malfeasance scandals in politicians’ behavior. In particular, we focus. Identifies problems such as political infighting, conflict between senior management and councillors and human resource management issues, together with inadequate revenue collection, ineffective financial systems, fraud, and misuse of municipal assets and funds. (i) the corruption scandal had a substantial negative effect on trust in politicians; (ii) the effect of the scandal was stronger in the days following its disclosure; (iii) the effect of the scandal was independent from individuals’ partisan preferences. By explicitly focusing on the electoral consequences triggered by instances of scandal, we provide an important domain restriction to the literature on scandals and corruption. Scandal and corruption are not the same thing. This article presents a brief overview of the relevant literature on integrity and corruption and on political scandals, with a summary of the conceptual framework and methodology used in our research, as well as some of the results. Scandal politics appears to cloud rational decision making and distorts a considered view of the public consequence of private actions. Scandal politics could be dismissed as the inconsequential outcome of political figures who are thoughtless enough to undertake action that is morally problematic. The conditioning effect of the election cycle creates incentives to manipulate the release of information that could lead to a scandal. Our study provides evidence that political opponents, newspapers, and/or investigation authorities act on these incentives. A closer look at the incidence of political scandal, this article will suggest, is an additional tool for the study of corruption and perhaps particularly so for comparative studies. A more fundamental (and more widely canvassed) problem, however, is so to define corruption as to facilitate reliable comparisons across temporal and cultural.
