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Exposing politicians' peccadilloes in comparative context: explaining the frequency of political sex scandals in eight democracies using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-06-23, 12:19 authored by John DowneyJohn Downey, James StanyerJames Stanyer
Political sex scandals are largely absent in some democracies but proliferate in others. However, there have so far been few if any comprehensive attempts to document the actual number of sex scandals that have occurred and to explain their presence (and, indeed, absence), and the one study that has (Barker's 1994 study) ended in the early 1990s and had numerous problems in relation to defining and documenting such scandals. Based on extensive research, this article documents the number of sex scandals in eight advanced industrial democracies and tries to explain their occurrence using Charles Ragin's fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The article has three goals: to determine the number of sex scandals in different democracies, explain why this might be, and demonstrate the utility of fuzzy set qualitative case analysis for small- and medium-N comparative research.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

Volume

30

Issue

3

Pages

495 - 509 (15)

Citation

DOWNEY, J. and STANYER, J., 2013. Exposing politicians' peccadilloes in comparative context: explaining the frequency of political sex scandals in eight democracies using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. Political Communication, 30 (3), pp.495-509.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis Group

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2013

Notes

This article was published in the journal Political Communication [© Taylor & Francis Group]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2012.737434

ISSN

1058-4609

Language

  • en