Predicting scandal

Abstract

Despite its salience in modern politics, scandal has only recently been treated as a subject of inquiry in political economy. Most of the literature has focused on scandal’s effects on electoral outcomes, while a theoretical literature on endogenous scandal has offered predictions and hypotheses that remain largely untested. This paper uses an original dataset of U.S. Congressional scandals to test some of those predictions. Special place is given to the role of opposition research by political opponents and the strategic timing of scandal release. Despite persuasive theoretical arguments in the literature as to factors that might affect scandal, we find the only meaningfully significant predictor of scandal incidence to be election timing.