Politics and scandals: The two go hand-in-hand.

Most recently in Nebraska State Sen. Julie Slama and others accused Charles Herbster, who was running for governor at the time, of sexual assault.

Herbster denied it, he also lost his bid to be governor.

Now a new study, with a Nebraska connection, is taking a closer look at scandals, specifically why do politicians lie and deny when caught looking the wrong way.

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Joe Jordan, NCN: “You've been working on a study that has to do with politicians denying their misdeeds, their scandals, in effect because we the voters basically want them to deny it.”

Pierce Ekstrom, UNL: “That was sort of the pessimistic prediction we actually had going into the study. The way in which the news is not as bad as we thought it would be is that what people are doing is allowing politicians to get away with denials of wrongdoing that they wouldn't normally tolerate either from people in their everyday lives and certainly not from politicians from the other party.”

Pierce Ekstrom, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, was one of five co-authors of this 18-page report.

Jordan: “What prompted you to do this study?”

Ekstrom: “We were worried based on some of the research that had been done in other areas that voters might be actively incentivizing politicians to deny wrongdoing and escape accountability for their actions. Everyday life is different from politics in many ways, right. But one important difference that we were interested in was that in everyday life if I do something that negatively affects you the polite thing for me to do is to apologize. But in politics right, it's not just you and me. Each of us have teams behind us. If I apologize I might risk making that team look bad and also maybe potentially sacrificing some of what we are sort of competing for in the political arena.  We were worried that people would actively punish politicians for apologizing and that that would incentivize them to really stick by their guns and insist consistently that they did nothing wrong. And we were pleasantly surprised actually to see that voters did not, well the participants in our experiments did not, punish politicians for apologizing but they did when they were from the same party of the politician, consistently tolerate more defensive denials of wrongdoing."

The study kept away from any real-world examples of scandals, such as those involving former President Donald Trump or President Biden’s family. Instead, the study created hypothetical situations. But even those hypotheticals made some things crystal clear.

Jordan: “Voters are OK when politicians make a mistake and apologize. But they're also OK if that person is in their own party, maybe a party leader, they're not necessarily looking for an apology they're willing to kind of let it go. Do I have that right?”

Ekstrom: “That's exactly right. When the politician was from the same party people tended to evaluate the politician more favorably and express more support for them. There is still a lot of room for politicians to get away with explanations for the behavior that we wouldn't normally accept.”