Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/197093 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Citation: 
[Journal:] Economies [ISSN:] 2227-7099 [Volume:] 6 [Issue:] 3 [Publisher:] MDPI [Place:] Basel [Year:] 2018 [Pages:] 1-10
Publisher: 
MDPI, Basel
Abstract: 
The 2017 U.S. Senate Special Election in Alabama, which was decided on 12 December 2017, was one of the most contentious and scandal-laden political campaigns in recent memory. The Republican candidate, Roy Moore, gained notoriety during the 2017 campaign when a number of women alleged to national media that as teenagers they were subject to sexual advances by Moore, who was then in his early 30s and serving as a local assistant district attorney. The process and results of this particular election provide the heretofore unexamined impact of political scandal on localism or friends-and-neighbors voting in political contests. Based on data from the 2017 special election in Alabama, econometric results presented here suggest that a candidate who is embroiled in political scandal suffers an erosion in the usual friends-and-neighbors effect on his or her local vote share. In this particular case, the scandal hanging over Moore eroded all of the friends-and-neighbors effect that would have been expected (e.g., about five percentage points) in his home county, as well as about 40% of the advantage Moore had at home over his opponent in terms of constituent political ideology.
Subjects: 
friends-and-neighbors voting
localism in elections
reputation capital
political scandal
JEL: 
D70
D72
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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