Political Fiascos and the Evaluation of Politicians: a Natural Experiment

While there is ample evidence that politicians’ evaluations worsen when they are involved in a political scandal, we know substantially less about how citizens react when politicians fail to manage a political crisis. Do citizens update their beliefs about politicians in response to political fiascos? Which individual characteristics hamper or facilitate this process of attitudinal updating? In this paper we exploit the coincidence of the mismanagement of the Ebola crisis by the Spanish Health Minister with the fieldwork of a representative survey. Given that the day at which individuals are surveyed is as if-random, this crisis represents a unique opportunity to identify the causal effect of political fiascos on citizens’ attitudes about the politicians involved in the decision making process. The results of this quasi-experiment indicate that the mismanagement of crises significantly affects the name recognition and job approval of the ministers involved, but not of the other members of the cabinet. Following the literature on attitudinal change we test for individual-level heterogeneous effects by partisanship, media exposure, and political interest.