Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TURNEYES (Turning a Blind Eye to Scandal)
Reporting period: 2023-02-01 to 2024-01-31
Why are some politicians electorally ‘punished’ for immoral behavior while others are not and how can we explain voters’ heterogeneous responses to identical moral transgressions? Despite decades of study, these two questions remain unanswered. Understanding voters' responses to politicians’ immoral behavior is important as scandals reduce citizens’ trust in both politicians and the political system, and lead to dissatisfaction with representative democracy. When politicians can avoid accountability for immoral actions, they may be personally protected from consequences, yet democracy itself suffers.
This study is the first to examine how voters’ responses to politicians’ moral transgressions -including voting behavior- are driven by (1) individual characteristics such as voters’ moral identity, moral principles and partisan identity, and (2) characteristics of the political context. This study aims to provide a testable theoretical model of voter response to political scandal.
This study is the first to examine how voters’ responses to politicians’ moral transgressions -including voting behavior- are driven by (1) individual characteristics such as voters’ moral identity, moral principles and partisan identity, and (2) characteristics of the political context. This study aims to provide a testable theoretical model of voter response to political scandal.
The first findings of this project show that for understanding voters’ evaluations of politicians involved in moral transgressions, it is necessary to look at both partisan identity centrality and moral identity centrality. The more central the moral identity the more negatively voters evaluate transgressors. The findings show that both American and English voters evaluate politicians engaged in moral violations who belong to their party (ingroup) more positively than politicians who do not (outgroup). However, the ingroup bias is stronger for partisans in the U.S. and Republicans have a stronger ingroup bias than Democrats. The ingroup bias in the transgressor’s likeability evaluation persists in the U.S. among those with higher moral identity internalization, while no such effects are found in England. We think that this difference reflects the differential degrees that electorates in these two countries are polarized along partisan lines and hold animosity towards the partisan outgroup. Results also show considerable partisan heterogeneity in voters’ desire for moral punishment in case of immoral behavior, strongly mediated by perceived severity. Republicans and Democrats differ in how severe they perceive politicians’ immoral behavior.. In the United States voters are more willing to forgive in-party transgressors than those of the out-party and the in-party bias in these intentions to forgive is independent of the moral principle violated. Born-again Christians, however, are more willing than any other group of voters to forgive transgressing politicians, irrespective whether an in-party or an out-party transgressor is involved.
Political scientists largely neglect voters’ moral identity when studying voters’ moral judgements of politicians’ immoral behavior. The results show that both the centrality of voters' moral and partisan identity matter for how voters respond to politicians involved in misconduct. The project findings should encourage other researchers to consider how voters’ multiple social identities that depend on degrees of internalization and situational factors are accessed when making moral judgments. In addition, this study shows how political context characteristics, such as affective partisan polarization (APP), interacts with individual voter characteristics, such as partisan identity, when judging politicians’ moral transgressions. The findings suggest that voters' moral identity affects moral judgments less in context with high levels of affective partisan polarization.