In the previous chapter we found that the British public is a demanding master, holding its elected representatives to very high standards. In this chapter we consider how members of the public go about the task of evaluating political conduct in practice and how their judgements are affected by the information to which they are exposed. Our starting point is the somewhat puzzling observation that most people appear to have little difficulty making up their mind about politicians. Though the vast majority of the public has almost no direct contact with elite politics or experience of what the day-to-day job of an MP, or minister or any other elected politician involves, they nevertheless find the task of judging the behaviour of political actors relatively straightforward. We are so used to reading about survey results on confidence in politicians that this fact does not at first seem extraordinary. But on further thought, the facility with which people judge their leaders’ professional actions is rather odd, given the many unusual features of political roles and the complex challenges faced by those who perform them. The analyses presented in this chapter are devoted to understanding aspects of how ordinary members of the public go about this task.

Since political conduct and misconduct is largely mediated, it is crucial to understand just how information reaches people. One piece of the puzzle is how the information presented to people shapes responses. The other piece is the way the mass media ‘mediate’ the information people employ to make up their minds. This chapter is structured around these two themes. It first considers how common norms shape and frame ethical evaluations, drawing on three survey experiments that enabled us to manipulate precisely the information that respondents received. It then considers how the source of information affects reactions to ambiguous actions undertaken by politicians, using some of the data on acts of ‘grey’ corruption with which we were familiarised in Chapter 4.