{"title":"Sorry Not Sorry: Presentational strategies and the electoral punishment of corruption","authors":"Dean Dulay , Seulki Lee","doi":"10.1016/j.electstud.2024.102867","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>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.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48188,"journal":{"name":"Electoral Studies","volume":"92 ","pages":"Article 102867"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Electoral Studies","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379424001252","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
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.
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