Can Individual MPs Damage Their Party’s Brand? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Public Procurement Corruption Scandal
Year: 2024
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: 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.
Source: The Journal of Politics
DOI: 10.1086/732945
Authors: Arndt Leininger, Lukas Rudolph
Institutions: Chemnitz University of Technology, University of Konstanz
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4402163848