Trying to Rank Scandals, Phase Two: The Preliminary Chart

As from the first post, my project for this year seems to be coming up with a ranking / grading system for scandals.  I've got a basic understanding that financial scandals rank higher than sexual scandals: however, there are other types of scandals that need configuring into the scale.

Thompson had located a study that broke the scandals into three types: Corruption (bribery, extortion, etc), Financial and Sexual (most likely referring to Personal bad behavior, more on that in a second), and Political (involving electoral or procedural misconduct).  And they scale in that order by level of outrage / loss of voter support.

Personally, I'd shift Financial scandals over to Corruption as they both cover the same things: greed, greed, misuse of funds, greed, and more greed.  Personal financial misdeeds like tax evasion or questionable spending habits tends to bleed into things like taking bribes or selling favors anyway.  The only time Sexual misconduct carries over into financial matters if there's payoffs or hiring of call-girls (most sexual misconduct either goes into extra-marital affairs or underage partners).

Just to be safe, I'll put Financial scandals separate from Corruption and Sexual, so that gets us four categories to work with.

Corruption

Financial

Sexual

Political

But Thompson also points out that there can be a difference in type of scandal that affects durability, or longevity of scandal: those that are substantive rather than salacious.  The word substantive has a few meanings, but the one relevant to politics would be "relating to an essential legal principle administered by the courts."  That it has real-world legal impact.  Salacious is "obscene" or "indecent", but in this application would be outside of legal implications (that is, something that didn't implicitly break a law).

I'm just wondering, can "substantive" apply to sexual scandal as much as "salacious" would apply to it?  Can a corruption scandal be "salacious"?  Political scandal, I'm pretty sure, can be both... could I draw up a chart like this as a basic scandal go-to chart?

	Substantive Scandal?	Salacious Scandal?
Corruption
Financial
Sexual
Political

This might not work in the long-term.  There's more to this, obviously.  Gonna need to break this down some more.

Any suggestions from the seven people reading this blog would be nice...