CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Rusnák, Alex |
|---|---|
| Title | Mitigating the damage of political scandal: Which communication strategy works best? An Experimental Study |
| Summary | Politician’s immoral actions and involvement in political scandals damage their public image and political approval. Previous experimental studies, however, provide scholars and politicians with little evidence on the effectiveness of various crisis communication strategies that politicians can use to mitigate the negative consequences of political careers. I make use of survey experimental design to test the effectiveness of denial and confession communication strategies on public political approval for the politician involved in a scandal. I randomly manipulate the type of scandal (extramarital affair / domestic violence) and type of crisis communication strategy (denial, confession, no communication) and measure the political approval rate of the involved politician. Findings from Slovak voters (N = 1173) recruited through paid and targeted Facebook ads suggest that denial strategy decreases politician’s estimated political approval in the extramarital affair scandal by 10 points, whereas in the domestic violence scenario it has a positive effect and increases political approval rate by estimated 8.7 points. Confession strategy has no significant effect on any of the scandal types. Additional effects of demographic variables are reported and visualized in the Appendix. |
| Supervisor | Gabor Simonovits |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/rusnak_alex.pdf |
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