The latest version of my manuscript (PDF) on the effects of political and media context on presidential scandal is now available online. Here’s the abstract:

Political scandal is typically portrayed as the direct result of misbehavior by public officials, but scandal should instead be understood as a widespread elite perception of misbehavior whose occurrence is also influenced by political and media context. I provide a theoretical argument for why the contemporary US presidents should become more vulnerable to scandal as (a) their approval ratings among opposition party identifiers decline and (b) congestion in the news agenda decreases. Using new data and analytical approaches, I find strong empirical support for both claims.

Please read the paper for more — comments are welcome. (I’ll have more to say on the relevance of my findings to President Obama’s experience in office soon.)