Can Individual MPs Damage Their Party’s Brand? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Public Procurement Corruption Scandal

Do voters punish parties for scandals of individual politicians among their ranks? To answer this question, we analyze the electoral repercussions of a political scandal in March 2021 in Germany. Several national members of parliament (MPs) of the then governing party, the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), became publicly suspected of being implicated in corrupt behavior. Leveraging the fact that the allegations surfaced shortly before elections in two German states, we can show that the scandal damaged the whole CDU/CSU party brand, although these elections were held at a different level of government, and although one state party chapter had no implicated MPs. We estimate the effect of the scandal, a loss of 4 percentage points to the party, through a difference-in-differences design—by differentiating trends in pre-scandal postal and post-scandal urn voting. We test and discuss enabling conditions that further electoral repercussions of individual politicians’ wrongdoing for their party overall.