Do First Ladies' Political Scandals Matter? Evidence from an Experimental Study

Political trust is a fundamental concept of democratic governance. It reduces the gap between societies and their political representatives, and it helps to prevent basic rules of democracies to erode. For political elites, trust contributes to their credibility, and it provides legitimacy for their actions and decisions. Existing research shows that trust to political leaders is not affected only by their performance in elected offices, but it is also formed by their private activities. In this light, scandals, and moral transgressions that political representatives commit in their private life reduce the trust voters place in them. The state of art is however underdeveloped, since prior works concentrate primarily on bad behaviour of political elites whose trust is investigated. The existing literature overlooks the question of whether trust in political representatives is similarly influenced by scandals involving their close relatives. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining impact of moral transgressions involving first ladies. We focus on first ladies since among all relatives of political elites they have attracted prominent public and media attention as companions of presidents including their active role during electoral campaigns. Using a survey experiment we test how different types of bad behaviour (luxury life, adultery, and driving under influence) affect both the trust towards the first ladies and the presidents. We find that while all types of scandals reduce the trust of first ladies, for presidents this occurs only in one of the three scenarios. What is more, we observe that conservative and liberal participants evaluate the scandals differently. In accordance with moral foundation theory, conservatives tend to penalize various forms of misconduct to a similar degree, whereas liberals consider transgressions against moral purity to be the least relevant. Finally, our results show differences between male and female participants with the latter being partly more tolerant to bad behaviour of first ladies. In sum, our research shows that private activities of political elites’ relatives may affect the trust of voters thus contributing to the literature on impact of bad behaviour in politics.