Scandals in Past and Contemporary Politics

This book is a useful and readable addition to the literature on political scandal, but it suffers from a degree of confusion as to its aims and purpose. Newell argues in an introductory chapter that one of the purposes of the book is to contribute to the debate ‘rather than offer research based on some a priori definition that may then turn out to be flawed’. However, he then comes up with a definition of scandal, as does his co-editor, and structures the book in such a way as to suggest that not only can scandals be explained, but that they have a function as well. Newell begins his introductory chapter by recalling the 1992 scandal that rocked Italian politics to its foundations—Tangentopoli—or ‘Bribe City’. As he says, it led to the transformation of the party system, reform of the electoral system and ‘the onset of a process of regime transformation.’ Newell states that ‘as scandals go, there are few to rival this one. It might even qualify, in some meaningful sense, as the twentieth century's greatest scandal’. If so, with the benefit of a decade-and-a-half of post-scandal politics and the memory of the Berlusconi government still fresh in the mind, we are entitled to ask whether in the end anything really changed.