Garrett 2
popular and scholarly wisdom focus on campaign scandals as key variables in congressional
elections, the data presented here show that political professionals classify a range of behavior
and events beyond “scandals” as campaign crises. I use in-depth interview data to develop a
typology which reflects how political professionals describe campaign crises. The typology is
useful in analyzing the diversity among kinds of campaign crises and their affects on
congressional campaigns.
LITERATURE
Existing Scholarly Work and the Focus on “Scandal”
Existing political science literature confines its analysis of campaign crises almost
exclusively to political scandals, which normally mean candidates’ ethical transgressions.
Although campaigns and elections scholarship might use the word “crisis” as a broad reference
to damaging campaign events, I have found no work that addresses campaign crises in a
theoretical and systematic manner as I do in this project.
1
Virtually all contemporary analyses operationalize scandal via coded keyword searches in
national publications such as Congressional Quarterly, The New York Times and The
Washington Post (Peters and Welch 1980; Roberds 1997; Lough 1998; Brown 2001). At the
most basic level, New Webster’s Dictionary (1992, 336) defines scandal as, “malicious gossip;
disgraceful action; disgrace; injury to a person’s character.” However, campaigns and elections
scandal definitions tend to be amorphous and sometimes contradictory.
2
1
Of course, case studies of single campaign crises do exist. For example, Jasperson (2003) offers a recent case
study of the “sympathy vote” in Minnesota after Paul Wellstone’s death.
2
Applying uniform standards to campaign “ethics” is similarly difficult (Miller and Medvic 2002, 30).
Convention