Not practicing what they preached! Exploring negative spillover effects of news about ex-politicians’ hypocrisy on party attitudes, voting intentions, and political trust

Abstract

Political hypocrisya frequent feature of contemporary politicsoftentimes occurs when politicians resign from office and then engage in behavior that is in fundamental opposition to the standpoints they originally campaigned for as incumbents. Previous research has neglected to examine negative spillover effects of news about ex-politicians' hypocritical behavior. Drawing from the inclusion/exclusion model and the feelingsas-information model, we conducted two experiments in two different countries and used different stimuli to increase external validity. Results suggest a dual process account of scandal spillover effects (an attitudinal and emotional mechanism) revealing that hypocrisy negatively affected both attitudes and emotions toward an ex-politician. Mediation analysis further showed that evaluations in turn negatively affected attitudes and voting intentions for the party the hypocritical politician used to belong to (attitudinal spillover process). No effects on general political trust emerged. In contrast, negative emotions had no effect on party attitudes and voting intentions but decreased political trust toward politicians in general (emotional spillover process). In line with the inclusion/exclusion model, the results help to explain inconsistent findings in previous studies that did not account for the suggested dual process account of spillover effects and underline the eroding effects of hypocrisy.

Scandal, Hypocrisy, and Resignation: How Partisanship Shapes Evaluations of Politicians’ Transgressions

“…Future work could overcome these limitations by employing an article format (cf. Carlson, Ganiel, and Hyde 2000;Cortina and Rottinghaus 2017;Maier 2011;von Sikorski and Herbst 2020). Moreover, these two studies recruited via Amazon MTurk, whose pool is more diverse than other convenience samples, but tends to be younger, more male, less religious, more educated, and more liberal than the US population (Boas, Christenson, and Glick 2020;Levay, Freese, and Druckman 2016).…”

“…These "spillover effects" of political scandals occur when an individual's interconnected cognitions are activated and people associate one target with another (Lee 2018). For example, when a politician is hypocritical, people not only evaluate the individual poorly but they also negatively appraise the politician's party (von Sikorski and Herbst 2020).…”

Expressing one's opinions freely on politicians using parodies: Effect of the sources of political parodies (user‐ vs. media‐generated parodies)

“…Lim and Golan (2011) do find that political parodies may trigger greater influence on others rather than on oneself. However, in this current research, in line with previous research on political humor (Holbert et al, 2013), we focus on perceived influence on self as citizens' self‐attitude toward a politician is a strong predictor on voting intention and decision (von Sikorski & Herbst, 2020).…”

Celebrity Politicians as Health-Promoting Role Models in the Media: the Cases of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu

“…The link between politician role models and health is of special significance. For instance, political hypocrisy which refers to a dissonance between what a politician politically advocates and personally practices can substantially affect public perceptions and behavior (Bhatti et al 2013 ; Von-Sikorski and Herbst 2020 ). Since politicians serve in leadership roles responsible for the public’s wellbeing, this could have dire consequences to public health, as political advocation for health policies could be undermined by political hypocrisy practiced by the same politicians.…”