Why are some politicians negatively evaluated for scandals while others are not? Prior research has focused on the effects scandals have on election outcomes and citizen evaluations of institutions. Less research investigates variation in reaction to scandals among the voters. I theorize that to understand how a voter responds to a scandal, we must understand the expectations he or she places on their representative. I argue negative evaluations of public officials are not simply a function of political leaders violating social norms, but rather their failure to meet the voter's expectations. In addition, scandals involving more than one public official should lower the voter's expectation of politicians in general, minimizing the scandal's impact of any one particular official. To test my theory I have built an original database of scandals and electoral outcomes, use public opinion data, and conducted a laboratory based experiment. The experiments will provide an individual-level test for causality for my theoretical expectations. The survey data will be used to test individual attitudes regarding candidates as a function of voter values and candidate reputation. And the scandal database will allow me to further test other implications of my hypotheses, and examine how well my theoretical expectations generalize across a variety of political contexts.