Do politicians have fewer sexual affairs in their marriages than other people on average? It seems like a counter-intuitive question looking back over the year.
From last summer to now (just after Labor Day) we have witnessed scandals involving - among others - Idaho Senator Larry Craig, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (who resigned today), New York Governor Elliot Spitzer (and his successor, New York Governor James Patterson), and Presidential candidate John Edwards.
Each scandal had its own memorable aspects of course; for example:
●Idaho Senator Larry Craig, a married, family-values supporter, publically deplored both homosexuality and extramarital affairs. Yet he allegedly solicited sex in a men's room in the Minneapolis airport using nonverbal communication that included taking a stall adjoining someone, and signaling him under the stall-wall with his feet.
●John Edwards, who had campaigned for the Democratic Party's nomination as its presidential candidate, finally acknowledged his affair with a young woman who had been hired to make a promotional video of his life and candidacy. Edwards originally had dismissed the National Enquirer report of his affair as "tabloid trash." Later, he defended himself by noting that the affair had taken place while his wife was experiencing a remission from her cancer.
Yet, vivid as each scandal is in our memories, were there really a lot of them? Politicians conducting extramarital affairs can be compared with men more generally.
According to the best estimates, about 1 in 5 men (20%) engage in such an affair sometime during their married lives, with 1 in 30 men (3.5%) involved in an affair over the past year. (For women, the statistics used to be lower, but are rising toward parity).
We should expect, therefore, that about 20% of politicians engage in such affairs - the same rate as for married men in general. Do they exceed this rate?
To try to find the answer, I estimated that there were roughly 415 male politicians who were married and of sufficient national stature to attract press coverage for their activities (including a sexual scandal; see "notes"below). If 415 is roughly correct, then about 83 (20%) of those 415 politicians had extramarital affairs sometime in their married pasts, and 14 (3.5%) of such leaders were engaged in affairs last year.
Given that we have heard just of 4 or 5 such political sexual scandals over the past 12 months, the public knows about far fewer affairs than might have taken place last year or before, based on the best estimates of marital infidelity (14 last year or 83 altogether). Two reasons for this come to mind: Either many politicians are successful at keeping these affairs secret, or our politicians are far better than most men in avoiding extramarital-affairs.
Whichever is true, we certainly can be captivated by the intrigue surrounding such scandals, but we should not be surprised at their seemingly high number; in fact, their frequency is lower than we might expect.
●Note: the rates on infidelity come from Weiderman's (1997) report on the General Social Survey in the Journal of Sex Research. I estimated that 415 national politicians are "eligible" for coverage of thier activities (including an alleged sex scandal) as follows...(1) I estimated that there were 610 politicians of sufficient national stature to attract regular media attention (100 senators + 435 congress people + 50 governors, and mayors of, say, the 25 largest cities (Milwaukee and Boston are around 25th). Next, I used a rough estimate that 519 (85%) of these leaders were men (from demographic reports of the national legislature in recent years), and , of those, 415 (80%) were married at present (from the same demographic reports). This post was re-titled and edited (shortened and focused) several weeks after I posted the original.
© Copyright 2008 John D. Mayer
