Sorry Not Sorry: Presentational strategies and the electoral punishment of corruption

IF 2.9 2区社会学 Q1 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Electoral Studies Pub Date : 2024-09-26 DOI:10.1016/j.electstud.2024.102867

Dean Dulay , Seulki Lee

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

A growing literature has explored various factors that hamper the electoral punishment of corruption. Most studies have focused on how voters react to a corruption allegation, but this focus leaves out an important, common aspect of corruption allegations that voters also encounter: politicians' blame avoidance strategies. This study examines how politicians' presentational strategies in response to corruption allegations affect voter sanctioning. Employing an online survey experiment on a sample of 3531 U.S. citizens, we find that politicians' action-oriented strategies, such as denying allegations, acknowledging a problem but denying responsibility, or acknowledging a problem and taking responsibility, are more effective than passive non-response. These three active strategies do not differ in their effectiveness. This result is robust to heterogenous levels of state-level corruption, partisan bias, and political knowledge. Our findings suggest that politicians’ presentational strategies may undermine political accountability for corruption, although they do not fully counteract the effect of corruption on voting intentions.

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对不起不是罪过：陈述策略与选举惩治腐败

越来越多的文献探讨了阻碍选举惩治腐败的各种因素。大多数研究侧重于选民对腐败指控的反应，但这一重点忽略了选民也会遇到的腐败指控的一个重要而常见的方面：政治家的避责策略。本研究探讨了政治家在回应腐败指控时的陈述策略如何影响选民的认可度。通过对 3531 个美国公民样本进行在线调查实验，我们发现政治家的行动导向策略，如否认指控、承认问题但否认责任或承认问题并承担责任，比消极不回应更有效。这三种积极策略在效果上没有差异。这一结果对不同程度的国家级腐败、党派偏见和政治知识具有稳健性。我们的研究结果表明，政治家的陈述策略可能会削弱对腐败的政治问责，尽管它们并不能完全抵消腐败对投票意向的影响。

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来源期刊

Electoral Studies POLITICAL SCIENCE-

CiteScore

3.40

自引率

13.00%

发文量

审稿时长

67 days

期刊介绍： Electoral Studies is an international journal covering all aspects of voting, the central act in the democratic process. Political scientists, economists, sociologists, game theorists, geographers, contemporary historians and lawyers have common, and overlapping, interests in what causes voters to act as they do, and the consequences. Electoral Studies provides a forum for these diverse approaches. It publishes fully refereed papers, both theoretical and empirical, on such topics as relationships between votes and seats, and between election outcomes and politicians reactions; historical, sociological, or geographical correlates of voting behaviour; rational choice analysis of political acts, and critiques of such analyses.