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AbstractPrevious analysis finds that people respond differently to "financial" (e.g., tax evasion) and "moral" (e.g., sexual misconduct) political scandals. However, experimental and observational studies tend to reach different conclusions about which type of scandal induces a stronger negative reaction from the public. We use an experiment embedded in a national survey to examine the possibility that these divergent findings can, in part, be explained by a failure to consider the effects of abuses of power. Consistent with previous experimental work, we find that people respond more negatively to financial scandals than to moral scandals when they do not involve abuses of power. However, abuses of power substantially affect responses to both types of scandals. We also find that moral and financial scandals affect personal and job evaluations of a politician differently. These findings support our contention that to understand public responses to scandal, it is crucial to consider the relationship between the scandalous behavior and the official's formal responsibilities.

Canonical work argues that macropartisanship—the aggregate distribution of Democrats and Republicans in the country at a given time—is responsive to the economic and political environment. In other words, if times are good when Democrats are in charge (or bad when Republicans are in charge), more Americans will identify with the Democratic Party. We extend the pioneering work of MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson (1989), who analyzed macropartisanship from 1953 through 1987, to 2021, assessing whether consumer sentiment and presidential approval still influence macropartisanship in an era of nationalized elections and affective polarization. We find that change has occurred. The effect of consumer sentiment on macropartisanship is no longer statistically distinguishable from zero, and we find evidence of "structural breaks" in the macropartisanship time series. Macropartisanship appears to have become less responsive to economic swings; approval-induced changes in macropartisanship have become more fleeting over time.

We report findings from a conjoint experiment where respondents indicated what they viewed as an appropriate sentence for a series of hypothetical individuals convicted of federal crimes. The experiment signaled the race of the defendant by using distinctively "Black" and "white" names, allowing us to assess whether Americans are more punitive toward purportedly Black defendants. We also consider whether signals of the defendant's race condition the effects of the crime and various defendant characteristics. Surprisingly, the direct effect of our signal of defendants' purported race is null. We present evidence that this null finding is a product of offsetting tendencies: respondents who view persistent racial inequalities as the product of both past and ongoing institutional factors prescribed lengthier sentences for white defendants; those who discount these explanations prescribed lengthier sentences for Black defendants.1 We find only scattered evidence that the signal of defendants' race moderates the effects of other characteristics of the crime and defendant. Our approach and findings not only offer insights into how racial attitudes shape perceptions regarding what constitutes just punishment for crimes in the contemporary United States, but also demonstrate a novel approach to studying this domain and point to an array of promising avenues for future research.