But a series<\/a> of academic<\/a> studies<\/a> suggest that people tend to justify the behaviour of politicians they support rather than changing their vote to back someone else. <\/p>\n Only when scandals become too blatant and heavily covered for supporters to rationalise away do politicians tend to lose support<\/a>. With this in mind, it\u2019s perhaps not surprising that Farage won comfortably on home turf.<\/p>\n The effects of scandals on our political attitudes are difficult to study, in part because scandals are rare events. The fallout from any individual scandal could be specific to the politician involved, the time period in which it occurred, or the detail of the scandal itself. Measuring the \u201cscandalousness\u201d of any one event is quite difficult.<\/p>\n These are some of the problems that my colleague James Tilley and I tackled in a study<\/a> of the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal<\/a> in the UK. Back then, hundreds of MPs were accused of claiming expenses to which they were not entitled. Many were required to repay money, and a small number were convicted of fraud and even jailed<\/a>.<\/p>\n The advantage of studying this particular scandal is that a large number of MPs were implicated in similar misconduct at the same time. In addition, the extent to which each MP was implicated could be quantified, both in terms of the value of expenses they were asked to repay, and by measuring the press coverage focusing on each MP.<\/p>\n Importantly, the extent to which each MP was implicated was essentially random across constituencies. This meant that we could measure how a broad swathe of people responded to allegations affecting their local MP.<\/p>\n We found that voters were remarkably aware of the extent to which their MP was implicated in the scandal. The greater an MP\u2019s apparent wrongdoing, either in terms of the money involved or the press coverage, the more their constituents noticed. However, while some constituents reduced their support for their MP, these effects were generally quite small and would probably have mattered only in marginal constituencies. This reaffirmed some previous<\/a> work<\/a> about the same scandal.<\/p>\n Another point we considered is whether scandals not only affect people\u2019s attitudes towards the politician implicated, but whether they also affect people\u2019s wider attitudes<\/a> towards politics as a whole. As such, a judgement about a particular politician becomes generalised into a wider assessment<\/a> of the performance of politicians in general. <\/p>\n This could be a cause for concern. Trust in politics is associated with whether people turn out to vote<\/a>, whether they comply with the law<\/a> and whether they support democratic forms of government<\/a>. As such, allegations of financial misconduct by politicians could have implications beyond election results.<\/p>\n However, we found no evidence that the constituents of heavily implicated MPs changed their attitudes toward the wider system, in comparison to those whose MP was less implicated. It doesn\u2019t appear that people tend to generalise the behaviour of their local MP into a wider judgment about the system as a whole.<\/p>\n Of course, there are several caveats when comparing the fallout from the expenses scandal with the claims against Farage. The former implicated many MPs at the same time, and the nature of the allegations was different. Farage is also a much more prominent figure than the typical MP we studied. And at the time of writing, the investigation into the claims against him is yet to conclude.<\/p>\nWider trust issues<\/h2>\n
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