Replication Data for: \"Can individual MPs damage their party’s brand? Quasi-experimental evidence from a public procurement corruption scandal\"

Are parties punished electorally by voters for scandals of individual politicians among their ranks? To answer this question, we analyze the electoral repercussions of a political scandal in March 2021 in Germany: Several national MPs of the then governing party, CDU/CSU, became publicly suspected to have been implicated in corrupt behavior. Leveraging the fact that the scandal surfaced shortly before state elections in two German states, we can show that the scandal damaged the whole CDU/CSU party brand, even though these elections were held at a different level of government and one state had no implicated MP. We estimate the effect of the scandal, a loss of 4%-points to the party, through a difference-in-differences design – by differentiating trends in pre-scandal postal and post-scandal urn voting. We test and discuss enabling conditions that lead to electoral repercussions of individual politicians’ wrongdoing for their party overall.

选民是否会因本党党内个别政客的丑闻，在选举中对该政党予以惩罚？为解答这一问题，我们分析了2021年3月德国一桩政治丑闻的选举影响：时任执政党基督教民主联盟/基督教社会联盟（CDU/CSU）的数名联邦议员被公众怀疑卷入腐败行为。借助该丑闻恰好在两个德国州的州选举前夕爆发这一契机，我们的研究表明，即便此次选举的政府层级与联邦层级不同，且其中一个州并无涉案议员，该丑闻仍损害了基民盟/基社盟的整体政党形象。我们采用双重差分法（difference-in-differences）设计，通过对比丑闻发生前邮寄投票与丑闻发生后票箱投票的选举趋势，估算出此次丑闻使该政党支持率下滑4个百分点。最后，我们还检验并讨论了个别政客的不当行为会对其所属政党整体产生选举负面影响的前提条件。