Atoning vs. evading when caught transgressing: two multi-theory-based experiments investigating strategies for politicians responding to scandal.

This article examines the effectiveness of various political scandal response strategies, focusing on apologizing and "stealing thunder"—a proactive disclosure of wrongdoing before media exposure—compared to common deflection tactics such as stonewalling, changing the subject, sequential apologizing plus deflecting, and silence. Two experiments with U.S. voters tested these strategies across different scandal types, including financial hypocrisy and sex scandals, measuring voters' perceptions of scandal cover-up, politician trustworthiness, and behavioral intentions. Results indicate that both apologizing and stealing thunder significantly outperform deflection strategies in fostering trust and favorable voter behavior, with no significant difference between apologizing and stealing thunder alone or combined. The findings support image repair theory and attribution theory perspectives, suggesting that politicians benefit most from acknowledging wrongdoing rather than evading it, despite the rarity of proactive disclosures in practice.