Cspan as a Public Service along with these other television cspan products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. There is something for every cspan fan. Every purchase helps support our nonprofit organization. Shop at cspanshop. Org. Host university of houston Political Science professor Brandon Rottinghaus joins us. His research over the years has been on political scandals, and the question he keeps referring to over time, do scandala still matter when it comes to a politicians career and the minds of voters . In american politics in 2023 do , scandals still matter . Guest it is a good question, and i think pertinent because we often use scandals as a way to be able to treat accountability and be able to frame a political system that sometimes voters do not get a chance to say directly and definitively how the process should go. So having a scandal in some ways is quite good because it exposes these kinds of problems and does often make leadership in government change things to make it so these things cannot happen again. On a question of whether scandals still matter, it is an evolving story. And that is what makes it so fascinating. I came of age politically during the clinton administration. Dates me, but it was a perfect time to come clinically because you get a sense of how it is that the system works and how polarization was creeping in and politicians were just beginning to understand how to deal with scandals. I came to the question organically with curiosity about the way accountability functions and polarization was a part of that. Host you talk about accountability. Is the way to determine whether a scandal matters determined by whether a politician is driven from office by said scandal . Guest partly that is true. I mean, if it is egregious enough wrongdoing, it is something that needs to be handled by the system. Sometimes voters do not have a say because of the way that elections are punctuated. It is not always the case that voters can decide. You have to have systems in place that prevents that. Scandals are a canary in the coal mine that give you an idea of how it is that the system is functioning and as a result you have laws that can effectively encourage accountability and require the system to adjust to these kinds of events. Host what kind of political scandals are more survivable than others . Guest good question. The best way to survive a scandal is to be an elected official. What i do is look at politicians from the top to more or less the middle, basically looking at governors and president s and members of congress, staff and cabinet members for executive offices like governors and president s. What i find is that if you are the governor or president , youre are unlikely to lose your position as a result of scandal. Often times, you see underlings falling on the sword. That will take care of it. So being the elected official , often is good. Being a senator as opposed to a house member is one way you can survive. Having the scandal be a political scandal or financial scandal often is better than a personal scandal. Personal scandals over time tend to be the more damaging. They also tend to be the ones that violate some unwritten norm, so they tend to be more dramatic. The single best way to survive scandals is to have more allies, have more friends. If you have a friend, you have a vote. That really works for scandals. Governors and president s, when they have more support they are able to survive more. Host what about when a scandal breaks in this age of social media, rapid moving news stories that 24 hours later in a completely different news cycle. Is it a matter of surviving the first few days or even hours of a scandal . Guest how you react initially gives us a signal as to what the scandals going to be like. We do see a lot of stonewalling nowadays. We see politicians pivoting to calling these things a witch hunt on a day where our former president was indicted for the fourth time. Obviously we are seeing a lot of , swirl around the news. That is something that does tend to indicate there is actual wrongdoing. The scholarship on this is pretty clear. One of the things that is interesting as we do see more stonewalling with the scandal is more politically damaging or there is more divided government. And so, there are moments with such political friction that politicians involved see the only way out is effectively to lie or obfuscate. Host what is your read of hunter biden and scandals republicans have pointed to when it comes to hunter biden . Guest we have seen this before. The president s family has been part of kind of a scandal apparatus going all the way back to jimmy carter and in some cases before billy carter traded on his brothers famous name. You had Roger Clinton doing the same. That was for his brother bill clinton. So, it is not uncommon to see this kind of political relationship evolve into something that on the business end of things can be problematic for the incumbent. In terms of specifics, it is troublesome for the democrats, who wanted to put this behind them. It looked like they were going to get that, but now they will fight out the scandal during an election, which is always something dicey. Although scandals like i find in this research do not hit like they used to or have the same debilitating impact, it is still the case that it can have negative consequences because it kicks you off message. That is something when you are running for president and trying to win the days news, it makes it harder to do. Host if you want to talk political scandals, now would be a good time to call in. Brandon rottinghaus with us for the next 25 minutes or take your calls and questions. Republicans, it is 202 7488001. Democrats, 202 7488000. Independents, 202 7488002. Professor, you have been researching this over the years and you write about it in your most recent report, the trump effect, how the Trump Administration has changed your outlook on this. What did you find . Guest in principle, there is a theory that suggests donald trump changed the way political scandals affected american politics, largely by letting people get away with things. We saw this in andrew cuomo. We see it in george santos. There are pieces of evidence that suggest that is true. If we look at this collectively, there is a slight effect for modern scandals where they do not have negative impacts on politicians that they used to, so there is a minor effect, but it depends on which level of government you look at. By virtue of being able to look at scandals from the 1970s to the present at every level of government, we can get a clearer sense of this. One thing we find is scandals used to be more problematic before than they are now. In a prepolarized area era during the 1970s following watergate, members of congress were very likely to lose their seats if they were involved in scandals. But that effect dissipates over time. We see a strange effect to where members of the executive branch are more likely to be hit negatively by scandals during the 1990s and the trump era, so there is a sort of change in effect, but it depends on who you are, so those things are meaningful in terms of how we assess what effect President Trump had on the world. I have to say i do not think that trump is to blame for these things. I think what is happening as this is a gradual process, beginning in the mid1990s. It became something where the political world changed. It was not the rules changed. It was that norms around rules changed. Now we have a world where people live in media ecosystems. We have a world where people do not trust the media like they used to. We have partisanship rising. All those things are contributing to this moment where scandals do not hit as much as they used to. The effect is not terribly strong, but i think if we extend the period we will see it become more effective. Host you mentioned new york congressman george santos. Can you just dive into your thoughts on his term as a congressman and how the multiple issues have unfolded since he became a congressman. Guest we have seen a rather stunning sort of change in terms of how politicians are able to get away with certain kinds of lies. In this case, there were a bunch of things that cascaded toward a particularly troublesome political term for the representative, but it is unusual to see it happen that much. And i guess the question is whether this is the signal or the noise. Largely, this is an outlier in terms of how the process goes. I think the same could be said of President Trump. The fact that these scandals tend to be dominant in the new cycle and tend to suck up all the oxygen politically from the administration, suggesting they are unique in that. I do not think we are used to seeing quite this much, but that is not to suggest that they do not tell us something about the system because they do. Surviving these things is getting harder. I think the more these things happen, the volume of the degree of challenge is certainly something that lots of politicians are going to be curiously watching. Host this is deborah waiting in mobile, alabama. Good morning. Caller you mentioned the scandals and i do not hear anything about trumps children yet and they were all involved in his while he was president. So i am looking forward to them , being investigated and all these senators, like santos, i think they should be investigated. Jordan. I dont think there is enough. It is only the democrats having to be investigated. Hillary clinton forever and ever in front of congress. This stuff just gets old and we need as democrats to pick up the mantle and start the investigations going forward. Right now, trump has taken the air out of everything and i want him investigated thoroughly, so looking forward to democrats taking over the senate and the house and presidency. Thank you. Host do the scandal investigations go both ways . Guest i think the democrats are taking a bit of a light hand at this state. They dont want to look like they are acting in a retaliatory manner so they chose not to. I will say on the larger point about how these investigations proceed and the politics of it, i do think that you are finding that congress does not do as they used to in terms of policing ethics. The Senate Ethics committee does not do the same work. The house Ethics Committee is not as investigatory as they used to be. So there are internal mechanisms at work potentially for the system to be able to right this. I mean, just look at how long it took Merrick Garland to find a special prosecutor. That gives you a pretty good sense that Everyone Wants to tread lightly because there are serious allegations here. I think that is something the system can correct. I think the good news frankly is that after all the scandals, one thing we have seen is there is a change after. And you do see the system respond in ways that help prevent these kind of things from happening in the future, so legislation can exist. Congress can put their shoulder into it and do more investigations, so the hope is these things are happening because a scandals a signal something is wrong. If you can fix that, you can make the system more accountable. Host for congressional scandals, when did the Ethics Committees have more teeth . Guest beginning in the mid1980s, there was a huge scandal involving members of congress who were passing hot checks from the house bank. This caught the ire of the public and hurt democrats in elections so congress reformed itself. They started putting rules in place to minimize that and try to enhance the ability for them to investigate themselves. That is something we have seen fall off in recent years. Certainly that is happening at the state level. I think we are seeing it happen at the agency level, having more investigatory powers is critical to making sure these kinds of things do not happen again. Host what about the role of Inspector General . Inspectors general . I guess that is how you say it. [laughter] guest one of the things we know is that, as a reaction to scandals, inspectors general kick it into high gear, so i looked at agencies to see the audits they did and investigations they did following a scandal. One of the things i did find is that when there are more scandals at the federal level, you see those inspectors general kick things into high gear and do more investigations. So, in a way, scandals are good like that. They give a signal that something is going wrong. And there is a reason to investigate more. Host political scandals is our topic this morning. Our guest is a university of houston professor Brandon Rottinghaus taking your phone calls. This is mary in washington, independent. Good morning. Caller oh. I wasnt ready. Host go ahead. You are on. Caller i had a message for the last people, the guy from the heritage and this is also for professor rottinghaus. I just wondered if the down in hawaii may have had anything to do with the fire they had because they never cleaned it up. Host we will get back to that topic and the large environmental conversation, but i only have professor rottinghaus for the next 15 minutes. I want to focus on his work. He has covered the idea of political scandal for decades. Why did you start focusing on this as a Research Area as a political scientist . Guest i got curious because i lived in spokane, not far from where the caller is in washington. The mayor of the city was embroiled in a significant scandal and ended up losing his political career. And it struck me there is a lot of these sort of patterns that we see happening across the country at all levels of government, where scandals hurt incumbents sometimes but not all the time. So how it mattered was curious to me. The type of scandal, the type of role they played, the kind of politics they engaged in. So those things struck me as something we could measure. That ultimately led to various projects where we looked at the ways this happens at the president ial level which is the most dramatic, but it also happens for governors and members of congress. Thinking about this in an Institutional Capacity was really important because everybody can apply the scandals can imply that scandals matter or dont matter, but looking at exactly how is the science of it and why i was curious to see what the effects were at various levels over time. Host what is the most interesting political scandal to you . Guest good question. There have been some really interesting ones. My favorite are the ones that are institutionally and politically the most impactful. So nixons scandal during watergate and i think scandals involving the way that democracy is working and how incumbents tend to try to subvert that or not. Those are most interesting to me because they happen to the core they tap into the core question about how government is supposed to function and the way politicians survive in that system, so to me those are the most telling. But we have had some very strange scandals over the years involving senators in bathrooms who theoretically are soliciting people. And so there have been , interesting scandals that this country has befallen. I think it is interesting because they are people. And they all have pressures. They are all politically aligned with various groups and they all have this power that lets them get away with things occasionally and how they choose to use that is a compelling story for our political system. Host bolingbrook, illinois. This is chris, a republican. Good morning. Caller thanks for taking my call. I had questions for the professor. The first is about what have you seen in the history of these types of scandals . You talked about family members being involved. I noticed that with respect to the supreme court, we have wives of justices kind of being implicated in scandals. What has history said about wives being involved, especially because today the wives are better educated, more politically astute, and have a lot of power. The second question is just about what does the number of scandals, type of scandals and the frequency say about the overall Political Health of the country . Host thanks for the question. Spouses, the supreme court, and what does it say about the Overall Health of the country . Guest the question about spouses is interesting. There is not a lot of work on that, although i do include the first family as part of the potential universe of scandals. They do tend to survive those scandals. They dont tend to be very damaging. Typically, they are smaller in scale, for instance pat nixon was involved in a couple small scandals and those things are often viewed as kind of noncombatants but eventually they start to really engage in certain activities that were unavoidably potentially illegal and problematic, so those things do over time tend to percolate. On judicial scandals, the kind of things that judicial individuals and elected judges or appointed judges can have an effect on peoples perceptions of the judicial system, so that is something. It goes to the second question, which is about the way this predicts Overall Health of the political system. I think more scandals is not great because it does distract us from core messages about how we make the country better or Public Policy stories that need to be able to be crafted. So those things are troublesome, but i think scandals are a signal. And those signals can be meaningful. So we cant ignore them. Obviously, we are going to have politicians who do bad things. If we have systems in place that help prevent those things from happening in the future, scandals can be informative about ways we move around that. Host this is roosevelt in brooklyn line for democrats. ,good morning. Caller good morning. My question is what impact does have on scandals . We as a country all saw the video of donald trump speaking about grabbing women inappropriately. We also heard him say he could stand on 5th ave and shoot somebody and still win. I just wanted to get your comment on what impact culture can have on scandals. Host professor . Guest if you mean the way that Popular Culture affects scandals, i think you are right that the way the scandal hits people is connected to their impressions about the world, so some people are more committed to a kind of moralistic view than others, so they are willing to punish politicians more. Other people have a more open view of things and as a result you do not see those folks as unhappy about certain kinds of scandals. A lot of people point to french politics, where having a mistress or being involved in adultery is not as big of a deal. Maybe it is not it is