As politicians stray from the straight and narrow, they are likely to do things that make voters fume, comedians laugh, and scholars study. Some misbehaviors, like drunk driving, are minor and may never be reported; others, such as extramarital affairs or accepting a bribe, can ruin careers. These incidents of misconduct are called political scandals.
Some are minor and do not affect policy outcomes, while others, such as corruption incidents, reveal a politician’s incompetence or a lack of commitment to the values that they claim to cherish. Corruption is a powerful negative signal that should cause voters to punish parties whose politicians engage in these offenses, ceteris paribus.
The problem is that political polarization complicates the ability of voters to determine whether a scandal truly implicates a politician. The more a party’s aligned faction is in disagreement with the opposing faction over ideological issues, the more it has an incentive to suppress information about their politician’s misdeeds and to make false accusations against the other party’s representatives. As a result, the overall level of scandal production is only weakly related to the underlying rate of misconduct.
In addition, partisan scandals have their own negative consequences. A politician who suffers a partisan scandal, in which the accusations of one party are vehemently denied by her own, is punished even more as voters conclude that parties’ refusal to report on their own members’ misbehavior suggests that they do not have the integrity to weed out undesirable behavior.