Joris Frese, "Politicians as Opinion Leaders and Shifts in Policy Alignment Caused by Valence Events"
Negative valence events, such as political scandals, can shift the electoral fortunes of politicians dramatically. Nevertheless, political parties often retain ties to implicated actors. I argue and demonstrate that such collaboration is a losing strategy due to spillover effects. Besides directly damaging the actor and indirectly damaging the party brand, scandals also depress voters’ policy alignment even when proposals are unchanged. Survey experiments in Germany and the USA confirm this hypothesis and also show that positive valence events yield asymmetric, but smaller, gains. A follow-up module deploying randomized response techniques to mitigate social-desirability bias suggests two complementary mechanisms: genuine loss of influence, and social norm pressure that discourages policy alignment with a tainted actor. A real-world quasi-experiment in a least-likely case corroborates external validity. Finally, the implications of these findings are discussed in relation to theories of voter behavior and the political calculus of parties and policy entrepreneurs when faced with transgressive opinion leaders in their ranks.
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel room K354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260203T170000Z DTEND:20260203T190000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR