Politicians Gone Wild: Moral Tolerance Judgements Against Political Candidates

Kelsey Wright Author

04/02/2021 Added

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With this research I explore the relation between the moral tolerance of political candidates and friends.

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[00:00:00.380]Hi, my name is Kelsey Wright
[00:00:02.480]and I am a sophomore biochem major here at UNL
[00:00:04.960]and I'm going to share with you my presentation today
[00:00:07.640]entitled Politicians Gone Wild:
[00:00:09.480]Moral Tolerance Judgements Against Political Candidates.
[00:00:12.460]So my overall research question was
[00:00:14.357]"To what extent are citizens willing to tolerate
[00:00:17.150]bad behavior or immoral behavior from their
[00:00:18.959]political candidates
[00:00:20.680]versus the amount they're willing to tolerate
[00:00:22.610]from their friends or colleagues?"
[00:00:26.200]So far, I think it's pretty fair to say that
[00:00:28.900]political scandals are pretty mainstream
[00:00:31.170]in American politics.
[00:00:32.980]A lot of different political science theorists have gone
[00:00:35.890]and researched this, but there's no consensus yet
[00:00:39.630]as to why some politicians are able to fully recover
[00:00:43.060]from these scandals and rerun and win elections
[00:00:46.858]while others are asked to resign
[00:00:49.527]and aren't able to continue with their political career.
[00:00:54.620]Some political science scholars have looked
[00:00:56.820]into the nature of the scandals,
[00:00:58.970]so whether it's relationship versus financial scandal
[00:01:03.576]and have overall found
[00:01:05.020]that financial scandals are a lot bigger deal
[00:01:07.370]and a lot harder to recover from.
[00:01:11.730]Others have looked into the timing of the scandal.
[00:01:14.340]So during political candidates candidacy,
[00:01:17.498]if it happens at the start of the campaign,
[00:01:20.400]they're doing pretty good, they can probably recover
[00:01:23.200]and win their election,
[00:01:24.190]but if it happens at the end
[00:01:25.310]it doesn't give them a lot of time to recover
[00:01:27.230]and they're usually not able to win that election.
[00:01:32.720]Other theorists have thought about the difference in
[00:01:34.730]political party and have theorized that
[00:01:40.320]wanting your party in power
[00:01:42.150]is going to overpower any other feelings you have
[00:01:44.730]about immoral behavior.
[00:01:46.360]And so even
[00:01:47.193]if your favorite politician has done something immoral
[00:01:50.110]that you don't agree with
[00:01:51.530]you're still likely going to vote for them
[00:01:53.130]because you don't want the other political party in power.
[00:01:57.440]So we pretty much just tried to figure
[00:01:59.560]out exactly what type of immoral behavior will be tolerated
[00:02:03.850]for politicians that wasn't tolerated
[00:02:05.990]for friends or vice versa,
[00:02:07.990]seeing if there was any statistical differences.
[00:02:10.030]And then we did look
[00:02:10.870]into partisan differences a little bit.
[00:02:14.080]Overall, I hypothesized that individuals are going to
[00:02:17.550]hold the politicians
[00:02:21.150]to a higher moral standard
[00:02:23.520]than they will their friends.
[00:02:25.740]And I thought that Democrats are going to be more likely to
[00:02:28.300]hold politicians to higher standards than Republicans.
[00:02:33.320]For this experiment, we used a survey
[00:02:35.476]and gathered data in the spring and fall semesters of 2020.
[00:02:40.360]We had 708 individuals participate from UNL campus,
[00:02:45.670]most of which received class credit for their participation.
[00:02:51.230]Our sample was majority white
[00:02:52.940]at 77% white and very religious.
[00:02:57.410]And then the sample was more likely to identify
[00:03:00.660]as Democrat at 58% while 41% as Republican.
[00:03:04.680]And then we were about equal between male and female ratios.
[00:03:09.650]In order to assess the moral tolerance,
[00:03:12.580]we asked multiple moral questions
[00:03:15.040]of politicians and friends.
[00:03:17.412]For the most part, they were pretty similar when they could.
[00:03:21.380]One was if they would abandon a special needs child.
[00:03:25.330]And so we were able to ask that for both thinking
[00:03:28.404]about your favorite politician and thinking about one
[00:03:30.783]of your friends.
[00:03:31.616]Some things just didn't quite go both ways.
[00:03:35.540]One example was we asked about the politician,
[00:03:40.410]what would you feel
[00:03:41.243]if they use campaign funds for personal gain,
[00:03:46.790]and then for the friend we had to ask
[00:03:48.530]if they would use charity funds for their gain.
[00:03:54.351]So that first graph there shows our results.
[00:03:57.640]The red is the politicians and the black is the friend.
[00:04:03.260]You can see that there are some statistical differences.
[00:04:08.000]We found those differences in lying under oath,
[00:04:11.110]cheating on taxes, illegal use of donated money,
[00:04:14.290]being a heavy drinker
[00:04:15.490]and failing to acknowledge an illegitimate child
[00:04:19.340]as well as using public money to pay for personal travel.
[00:04:22.840]With all of these, there was less moral tolerance
[00:04:26.197]for the politicians than the friends,
[00:04:28.850]except for
[00:04:34.480]failing to acknowledge an illegitimate child
[00:04:36.840]in which there was more tolerance.
[00:04:40.460]So higher numbers on the scale means
[00:04:42.620]that there is more tolerance for the behavior
[00:04:44.690]and lower numbers means there's less tolerance
[00:04:46.990]for the immoral behavior.
[00:04:48.350]So when the friend is higher than the politician
[00:04:51.010]that means that the politician has less tolerance.
[00:04:55.130]And then below you can see there that first density
[00:04:57.890]plot is showing the friend versus Democrat.
[00:05:02.000]This illustrates really well that people
[00:05:06.560]aren't going to tolerate really high levels
[00:05:09.650]of immoral behavior from friends or politicians
[00:05:12.310]which is why it slips off so steep.
[00:05:14.690]And I realized that I'm mirrored the other way, that way.
[00:05:17.790]And it also shows that red being all the way to the right,
[00:05:23.692]hopefully your right maybe your left
[00:05:27.140]shows that
[00:05:33.032]they hold politicians to a higher standard.
[00:05:37.520]And then below that are the two plots
[00:05:41.193]for Democrat versus Republican.
[00:05:43.215]So on the last that figure three is showing
[00:05:45.665]the political questions.
[00:05:51.065]So you can see that that blue is way over,
[00:05:52.510]and so they expect a higher moral standard
[00:05:55.530]than Republicans do.
[00:05:57.030]And then that figure four is showing the friend
[00:05:59.340]and you can see that's extremely similar
[00:06:02.450]between Republican and Democrat.
[00:06:03.740]So it doesn't really show a difference there.
[00:06:07.570]Overall, we definitely found that people hold politicians
[00:06:11.620]to a higher moral standard,
[00:06:13.345]and that Democrats hold their politicians
[00:06:15.930]to a higher moral standard.
[00:06:17.210]I think this is really well illustrated
[00:06:19.610]with the Me Too movement.
[00:06:21.151]So with Democratic Senator Al Frankin was asked to resign
[00:06:26.810]after a lot of comments that he sexually harassed people
[00:06:31.523]and he did end up resigning.
[00:06:34.370]And New York's current Democratic governor
[00:06:38.220]is feeling very similar things right now
[00:06:42.044]although very similar allegations have been made
[00:06:45.080]been made against Republican Donald Trump.
[00:06:47.700]And there's really been little waver in his following
[00:06:51.060]and no one calling for his resignation for that reason,
[00:06:55.120]especially from his own followers.
[00:06:57.540]I think that our future research should really focus
[00:07:01.230]on gender.
[00:07:02.260]For this study we just asked for them
[00:07:07.900]to imagine their favorite politician
[00:07:10.540]instead of asking to imagine a female or a male politician.
[00:07:14.910]And I think in the future
[00:07:15.910]that these could show some very different moral standards
[00:07:19.050]for the female and male politicians.
[00:07:21.880]Otherwise, thank you so much for listening
[00:07:23.720]to my presentation and a special thank you to
[00:07:26.100]Dr. Kevin Smith and Clarisse Warren for helping me
[00:07:28.820]so much with all of this research.
[00:07:31.145]Thank you, bye-bye.

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Politicians Gone Wild: Moral Tolerance Judgements Against Political Candidates

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