Gender, scandals and political careers: How parties negotiate mistakes

Previous research has found that women’s political careers are more vulnerable than men’s. Not just do women face more barriers in getting included in politics, but their careers are found to be more easily disrupted by factors such as scandals, family matters, harassment, and toxic work relationships. Though scholars have demonstrated how women are more likely to be punished from wrongdoing than men, few have attempted to analyze the role political parties play in avoiding and negotiating scandals. In this paper we address this shortcoming and analyze how parties, by navigating their conflicting goals, strategically support some politicians who have violated laws or guidelines, while failing to do the same for others. Empirically, we focus on Norway, a country characterized by comparatively high trust in politicians and historically few major political scandals, but where several distinguished Norwegian female politicians—and a few men—have been found guilty in breaching different guidelines for how elected leaders ought to handle their public and private affairs in recent years. The list of misconduct in office includes stock trading husbands, appointments of friends to board positions, theft, and fingering with information about residency. Using a mix of qualitative interview data and survey results from the Norwegian citizen panel, we ask what parties do to avoid and negotiate the effects of individual politicians’ mistakes. As such, our research sheds light on parties’ role in securing the careers of their politicians, and simultaneously how party considerations intersect with politicians’ gender, implicating that gender can shape yet another aspect of the trajectory of contemporary political careers.