Political Scandal: A Theory

Scandal Potential How political context and news congestion affect the president’s vulnerability to media scandal

Despite its importance in contemporary American politics, presidential scandal is poorly understood within political science. Scholars typically interpret scandals as resulting from the disclosure of official misbehavior, but the likelihood and intensity of media scandals is also influenced by the political and news context. In this article, I provide a theoretical argument for two independent ...

Online appendix for Scandal Potential: How political context and news congestion affect the president’s vulnerability to media scandal

Political Theory

Political theory, sometimes also called “normative political theory”, is a subfield of the disciplines of philosophy and political science that addresses conceptual, normative, and evaluative questions concerning politics and society, broadly construed. Examples are: When is a society just? What does it mean for its members to be free? When is one distribution of goods socially preferable to an...

A Theory of Political Polarization*

We present a simple theory of voters’ preferences over representatives, assuming that a representative will vote on one’s behalf. Few, if any elected representatives are capable of unilaterally implementing their platforms: rather, they choose between options generated by other actors and/or external events. When this is the case, voters’ preferences over candidates’ platforms will almost alway...

POlitical theOry as a VOcatiOn

The purpose of this paper is to sketch some of the implications, prospective and retrospective, of the primacy of method in the present study of politics and to do it by way of a contrast, which is deliberately heightened, but hopefully not caricatured, between the vocation of the “methodist”1 and the vocation of the theorist. My discussion will be centered around the kinds of activity involved...