Are there academic studies that track criminal indictments of politicians by party over multiple years?
Executive summary
There are numerous compilations, news fact‑checks and public databases that tally indictments, convictions and misconduct of U.S. politicians across years and by party — examples include GovTrack’s misconduct database, Wikipedia lists, and journalistic fact‑checks such as PolitiFact — but the reporting and data found in the sources provided do not amount to a clear set of peer‑reviewed academic studies that systematically track criminal indictments of politicians by party over long spans with transparent, reproducible methodologies [1] [2] [3]. What exists is a mix of public datasets and media tallies that scholars sometimes cite or use as raw material, but these are often contested on scope and definitions [4] [5].
1. Existing public datasets and journalistic tallies
Several publicly accessible compilations document alleged or proven misconduct and convictions of federal politicians: GovTrack’s Legislator Misconduct Database lists hundreds of instances from 1789 to the present [1], Wikipedia maintains lists of convicted federal politicians [2], and independent journalists and bloggers have created multi‑decade tallies summarizing indictments and convictions by administration or party [6] [4]. Fact‑checking organizations have also aggregated counts to compare recent administrations; PolitiFact’s counting exercise — cited in several outlets — found many more indictments tied to a set of recent Republican administrations than to a comparable set of Democratic ones [3] [7].
2. Academic scholarship vs. media analyses
The material in these sources is largely journalistic, crowd‑sourced, or maintained as public reference databases rather than published in peer‑reviewed academic journals as longitudinal party‑comparative studies; the supplied sources do not show a canonical academic paper that alone provides a multi‑decade, party‑by‑party indictment time series with a standard methodology [1] [2] [3]. Academic researchers do study criminal justice and politics — for instance comparing offenders’ party registration or examining the political effects of criminal justice contact — but the specific claim “academic studies that track criminal indictments of politicians by party over multiple years” is not substantiated by a single peer‑reviewed longitudinal study in the provided reporting [8].
3. How counts and conclusions diverge
Different tallies reach similar directional conclusions (more indictments and convictions tied to some Republican administrations across specific windows), but they disagree on magnitudes and on who qualifies for inclusion: some counts include aides, outside contractors or entities; others limit to sitting officials or people in the executive branch; sources even disagree on Watergate totals and who counts as a “government figure” [6] [9]. That variation undercuts any simple headline like “Republicans X times more corrupt” unless one specifies the precise dataset, inclusion rules and time frame [6] [5].
4. Methodological pitfalls researchers face
Anyone attempting a rigorous, multi‑year partisan comparison must resolve fundamental choices: what counts as an “indictment” (grand jury indictments vs. charges filed vs. impeachment articles), which offices to include (presidential appointees, members of Congress, state officials), how to attribute party responsibility for unelected staff, and how to handle post‑tenure legal actions and pardons — contentious decisions documented across the sources and underlying the disparate tallies [9] [6] [4].
5. Bottom line and practical next steps for researchers
The best available materials for a researcher are the public databases and journalistic tallies — GovTrack’s misconduct database and compiled lists on Wikipedia provide accessible raw data, and fact‑checks like PolitiFact provide transparent snapshots — but the sources provided do not demonstrate a canonical, peer‑reviewed longitudinal academic study that alone answers the party comparison question; scholars building such a study would need to assemble, standardize and justify inclusion rules from these raw sources and document robustness checks [1] [2] [3]. For readers seeking rigor, the immediate recommendation is to consult the primary databases (GovTrack, original DOJ and special‑counsel reports) and to look for academic papers that cite and vet those data, because the media tallies are useful but methodologically heterogeneous [1] [6].