6 POLITICIANS BEHAVING BADLY
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3 Punishment in the Court of Public Opinion A pragmatic political rule for avoiding punishment is: Don’t do anything in private that you would have to apologize for if exposed to public scrutiny. A cynical variation is the injunction: Whatever you do in private, don’t get caught. When politicians miscalculate and their private actions become open to public evaluation, they can accept or reject the verdict of the court of public opinion. This virtual court issues judgments in the form of media headlines, statements by good governance advocates, public opinion polls and election results. The court of public opinion complements judicial institutions that can only try officials for activities deemed illegal within the narrow confines of statute law. By contrast, the institutions that collectively constitute the court of public opinion employ standards that ordinary people are free to use when evaluating the behaviour of their representatives. Varied forms of punishment. The punishment that the public thinks appropriate for a particular behaviour indicates the importance that people attach to the standard that has been broken. Immediately after asking each question about how many politicians break a particular standard, the PBB survey asked what should happen to a politician who breaks it. Up to five alternatives were offered ranging from the harshest—going to jail or losing their job—to no punishment is needed. There were also intermediate categories, such as paying a fine or publicly apologizing. Since these punishments are not mutually exclusive people were allowed to endorse the imposition of multiple punishments. There is overwhelming public agreement that breaking informal standards of behaviour deserves punishment (Table 3). A majority would like to see an offending politician show a sense of shame by making a public apology for what they have done. Politicians differ in how and whether they apologize. They can show sincere signs of regret or wrap their apology in a request for sympathy or self-justification and standards have been changing. A half-century ago a British government minister, John Profumo, accepted his shame after he was exposed as having lied to the House of Commons about a sexual affair. Profumo not only apologized for doing so but also resigned as an MP and undertook a long career as a volunteer social worker among the poor of London. After Bill Clinton’s public admission of sexual misbehaviour with an intern in the White House Oval Office in the late 1990s, he concluded his nominal apology with an attack on the partisan motives of those who had exposed
