ABSTRACT
The first written account of a scandal can be traced back to ancient Greece in 415 BC when Athenian commander Alcibiades destroyed the stone images of the gods and was accused of sacrilege (Neckel 2005). Over the centuries and as democracies emerged and developed, scandals came to be used negatively in order to gain political or some other power advantage: from eighteenth-century Britain when conservatives would depict libertines as threats to the family and the state (Clark 2003) to the late nineteenth century when professional journalists became involved as investigators. This continued into the twentieth century with politicians and political parties as key actors and by the end of the century scandals had become a feature of contemporary liberal democratic politics.
