The Politics of Scandal in Spain

Abstract

This article has a double purpose. On one hand, it briefly reviews the main political scandals in democratic Spain and tries to account for why political corruption gained a privileged position in the Spanish public agenda only during the decade of the 1990s and up to the Socialist’s electoral defeat of 1996. On the other hand, and the main focus of this article, the Spanish case is used to build a model for the analysis of scandals based on the idea that these phenomena are not automatic processes of social control but rather the result of political struggles among different social elites of which the final outcome is unpredictable.

No Laughing Matter: Armin Laschet and the Photographic Exposé

“…On the one hand, it is democratizing in the sense that the distance between voters and politicians have shrunk to create new forms of intimacy (Meyrowitz 1977; Stanyer 2013). On the other hand, this opening up of private space also imposes on the politician a new level of moral critique of character and personality, where, as Thompson (2005: 42) notes, “an indiscreet act, an ill-judged remark or an unwarranted disclosure can have disastrous consequences.” Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of “capital,” Thompson (2000) considers such disclosures to be acutely dangerous because they erode the politician's symbolic capital, that is, his or her public reputation.…”

“…The very notion of the political scandal and exposé builds on the assumption that politicians behave differently behind the scenes. Advanced democracies are organized around the idea that political back-stage behavior is often morally and legally dubious and that the primary role of watchdog journalists is to disclose such behavior and effect sanctions and reform (Keane 2018; Schudson 2015; Thompson 2000). There is an entire folk narrative about politicians concerned with “secrets,” “backroom deals,” “sleaze,” etc.…”

“…At a broader level, the paper's focus on the photographic exposé offers a two-sided contribution to the study of political communication. While there is now a sizable body of work on political scandals (e.g., Allern et al 2012; Barbiero 2020; Dziuda and Howell 2021; Jimenez 2004; Thompson 2000), it only pays fleeting attention to the role of photographic images in these processes. More broadly, visual politics is by no means a new field.…”

Austerity politics and constitutional crisis in Spain

“…Simultaneous retrenchments in the realm of economic opportunities, material wellbeing and social rights have in turn set the stage for the exposure of the systemic corruption built into the Spanish political economy. A politics of scandal (Heywood 2007: Jiménez 2004) has re-emerged, in which nearly all of the establishment political parties have been implicated.…”