Do Voters Still Care? The Effect of Polarization on Scandal Tolerance / Chin Guo.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This project argues that the rise of affective polarization in the United States has eroded democratic accountability by increasing voter tolerance for political scandals. As negative partisanship intensifies, voters increasingly make tradeoff decisions that prioritize party loyalty and electoral victory over candidate integrity or ethical behavior. Focusing on incumbents in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1980 to 2016, this project combines case studies and quantitative analysis to examine how scandal consequences have shifted over time. The case studies illustrate that politicians facing less severe scandals in earlier decades were often pushed out of office, while more recent, serious scandals are frequently met with indifference or partisan defense. The quantitative analysis uses both primary and general election vote shares to assess the electoral impact of scandals, incorporating variables for scandal type, party affiliation, and polarization. The findings show that while scandals still exert a negative effect on vote share, this effect is increasingly mitigated in highly polarized contexts. This project also finds vote share outcomes after incumbents are involved in scandals differ by party and scandal type, with notable asymmetries in how incumbents from the two parties are sanctioned. The broader pattern remains that rising polarization protects incumbents from electoral sanction, even in cases of clear misconduct. These results suggest that polarization is not merely reshaping elite behavior but is also changing how voters enforce, or fail to enforce, ethical standards. As scandal consequences weaken, the foundation of democratic accountability is undermined, signaling the need to update expectations of voter behavior and political accountability.