Does Time Heal All Wounds? Sex Scandals, Tax Evasion, and the Passage of Time

For a politician, reputation is a crucial commodity. Bad behavior like involvement in a scandal may leave a politician open to damaging criticism from potential opponents. Yet, scandals are hardly automatic political death sentences; some studies estimate that as many as half of American legislators who have been implicated in scandals win reelection (Basinger 2013; Peters and Welch 1980; Welch and Hibbing 1997). This suggests that a candidate’s past missteps provide opponents with powerful ammunition under some conditions, but less leverage under others. In this article we focus on one factor that may be particularly infl uential in determining the extent to which past involvement in a scandal can be used against a candidate: whether it occurred recently or long ago. Recent events in both congressional and presidential politics demonstrate not only that politicians believe they can overcome the negative eff ects of previous scandals in some circumstances, but also that their opponents are typically eager to remind voters of those misdeeds. For instance, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 despite censure by the House of Representatives during a “fi nancial” scandal in 1997, when he was found to have claimed an improper tax exemption. Mitt Romney, one of Gingrich’s primary opponents, issued a press release “celebrating” the 15th anniversary of this censure, presumably to remind voters that Gingrich’s career had not been unblemished.1 More recently, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who did not seek reelection to that offi ce in 2010 after his involvement in an adultery scandal the previous year, was elected to represent that state’s First District in Congress. Sanford’s primary opponent—Curtis Bostic—repeatedly referred to Sanford’s aff air and described him as a “compromised candidate. ”2 The scandals in which Gingrich and Sanford were involved varied with respect to the amount of time that had passed when they sought offi ce—Sanford’s was fairly recent, Gingrich’s was not. Yet, each faced attacks from opponents eager to capitalize on character issues, and each man found his past misdeeds to be a reliable part of the media narrative surrounding his campaign. This suggests that politicians implicated in scandals can expect to face character questions stemming from their previous behavior, regardless of the amount of time that has passed since the off ense. An unanswered question is whether attacks based on recent misdeeds resonate more with voters than those centered on scandals that occurred long ago. We report fi ndings from two survey experiments that provide insight into the likely eff ectiveness of attempts to damage a political opponent by highlighting previous involvement in scandals. One possibility is that people see a misstep that occurred 20 years ago as “old news” that is not particularly relevant to an assessment of an individual’s present-day character. If that is the case, then candidates may have little reason to worry about opponents bringing up skeletons in their closet, so long as suffi cient time has passed for the public to view the past behavior as a weak signal of the individual’s character or trustworthiness. However, it is also possible that people see scandalous behavior as a strong and enduring signal about the candidate’s true nature, regardless of whether it occurred weeks or years in the past. If so, candidates may still be vulnerable to accusations of untrustworthiness based on scandals from long ago.