A simple computer model describing the influence of a political scandal on a voting process in a two-party society, is presented. We discuss the role of three parameters charactering a scandal — its magnitude (volume of coverage in the media), time it occupies place in the media and the openness of the society. We show that the dependence of the magnitude of a scandal needed for the opposition to take power on the parameters of the model exhibits two regimes — fast and slow changes. Increasing presence of a scandal in the media for a very long time, as well as increasing the openness of the society might not produce a noticeably different effects than a shorter one. Comparison of the model with the data for president Nixon support during the Watergate affair, shows reasonably good agreement.

提供了一个简单的计算机模型，描述了两党社会中政治丑闻对投票过程的影响。我们讨论了丑闻的三个参数的作用-丑闻的大小（媒体的报道量），它在媒体中所占的时间以及社会的开放性。我们表明，反对派掌权所需的丑闻规模对模型参数的依赖性表现出两种状态-快速变化和缓慢变化。很长一段时间以来，丑闻在媒体中的出现增加以及社会的开放性可能不会产生与较短的丑闻明显不同的影响。该模型与水门事件期间尼克松总统支持的数据进行了比较，显示出相当好的一致性。