Replication Data for: The Politics of Forgiveness

While the United States’ electoral system is thought to incentivize those entrusted with power to serve as adequate and responsible representatives, it also provides voters the ability to hold those who violate this trust accountable when such an incentive is not enough to ensure proper behavior. However, it has been suggested that members of the electorate sometimes perform this role suboptimally and non-uniformly in situations involving credible allegations of misconduct. Uncovering the mechanisms that underlie decisions voters make pertaining to electoral accountability not only helps to understand why this happens, but also identifies ways in which electoral accountability outcomes can be improved. This dissertation leverages political scandal to investigate patterns of non-uniform electoral accountability in American politics. In the first chapter, I aim to provide a more generalized and comprehensive theory to explain many of the heterogeneous effects of political scandal which have been noted by previous scholars. I propose a theory which links salient details of the scandal narrative relating to those involved, and the transgressive behavior committed, to prominent political and social issue positions of the electorate. This theory, termed the issue space scandal theory, states that these details, which are often unrelated to the seriousness of the offense, interact with ideology to change voters' perceptions of issue competence and ideological distance in predictable ways. This, in turn, shifts the lens through which the scandal is evaluated and influences the propensity of certain voters to hold a politician to account for misconduct. Chapters 2 and 3 use an original survey experiment to test this theory. I find that liberals are more punishing of politicians accused of sexual harassment than conservatives, but only when the politician in question is white. On the other hand, I find that conservatives are more punishing of politicians accused of breaches of national security, but only when the politician apologizes for, rather than denies, the allegation. I offer an explanation for why these results are consistent with the issue space scandal theory. Chapter 4 provides an additional test of the theory outlined above using observational data from Gulati and Brown (2021), which contains scandals observed in the House of Representatives between the years of 2000 and 2018. With this data, I show that Republicans with past military experience suffer fewer electoral penalties than those without when accused of scandal. And finally, in Chapter 5 I evaluate how the accounts offered by politicians to repair their image after credible allegations of misconduct---either an apology or an outright denial---as well as respondents' pre-treatment trust in media affect the propensity of respondents to hold a politician accountable for transgressions. Consistent with recent findings in the field, I find that denial is the most effective strategy for minimizing the damage of alleged misconduct. However, I also find the effectiveness of a denial is conditional on an audience's trust in media, and as trust in media increases, denial becomes no more effective than an apology. Not only does this offer an explanation for why denial has been found to be most effective in the wake of political scandal, but also underscores the role media plays in limiting the ability of political elites to manipulate the electorate for personal gain.