Voters’ Partisan Responses to Politicians’ Immoral Behavior

Politicians’ moral behaviors affect how voters evaluate them. But existing empirical research on the effects of politicians’ violations of moral standards pays little attention to the heterogeneous moral foundations of voters in assessing responses to violations. It also pays little attention to the ways partisan preferences shape responses. We examine voters’ heterogeneous evaluative and emotional responses to presumably immoral behaviors by politicians. We make use of moral foundation theory’s argument that people vary in the extent to which they endorse, value, and use the five universally available moral intuitions: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. We report on a 5 × 3 between‐subjects experiment asking a random sample of 2,026 U.S. respondents to respond to politicians’ violations of different moral foundations. We randomly vary which of the five foundations is violated and the partisanship of the actor (Republic/Democrat/Nonpartisan). Results suggest that partisanship rather than moral foundations drives most of U.S. voters’ responses to moral foundations violations by politicians. These foundations seem malleable when partisan actors are involved. While Democrats in this sample show stronger negative emotional response to moral violations than Republicans, partisans of both parties express significantly greater negativity when a politician of the other party violates a moral foundation

Seen one, seen ‘em all? Do reports about law violations of a single politician impair the perceived trustworthiness of politicians in general and of the political system?

By bringing together a sophisticated conceptualization of political trustworthiness (integrated model of trust) with theorizing from information processing (trait inferences, inclusion-exclusion model), our research aimed at investigating the impact of a politician’s unlawful behavior on political trust. In four experimental studies, we investigated how laypersons draw inferences from media reports about a politician’s law violation to the trustworthiness of (a) that politician, (b) politicians in general, and (c) the political system as a whole. Participants who read a bogus newspaper report about a violation of law (child pornography or financial fraud) ascribed lower integrity, benevolence, and competence to the respective politician compared to those in a control condition (Study 1, 3, & 4). The perceived trustworthiness of politicians in general and the political system was also found to be decreased in one study (Study 2), which did not include items asking for the trustworthiness of the law-violating politician. By contrast, two studies including such items revealed only indirect effects through the perceived trustworthiness of the politician in question (Study 3 & 4). Our results suggest that law violations negatively affect the responsible politicians. In line with the inclusion-exclusion model, the impact from the wrongdoing of one politician to all politicians or the political system seems to be highly influenced by boundary conditions