Search

On paper, women politicians should be punished more than men when they go negative during election campaigns. Yet, empirical evidence in this sense is surprisingly scarce, and findings offer a muddled picture. In this article, we argue that existing research has, so far, neglected to consider a fundamental intervening factor: the role of the context, and specifically the level of descriptive representation of women in politics. Using novel large-scale data for 700+ candidates having competed in 150+ elections in 94 countries worldwide, we test – and confirm – the expectation that women are especially punished for negative campaigning in countries with low descriptive representation of women in politics. This pattern does not hold in more gender-equal contexts. Additional observational evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) shows that this electoral punishment is likely due to voters expressing lower likability of women candidates (compared to men) when the former go negative in countries where women are less established in political leadership positions. We suggest that inconsistent results in previous studies are likely due to the lack of comparative focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do parties campaign differently in different circumstances? Research seems to suggest that parties do indeed engage in harsh interparty attacks and fearmongering during ‘second-order’ elections, such as European elections/elections to the European Parliament (EP), perhaps even to the same extent as during national elections. However, to the best of our knowledge, the differences in the campaign strategies used by parties in national and European elections have never been assessed systematically. In this article, we compare the content of election campaigns (negative tone, fear appeals, enthusiasm appeals) by 150+ parties across 28 countries that participated in the 2019 elections to the European Parliament and at least one national election between 2016 and 2020. Triangulating two independent expert surveys (EPEES_19 and NEGex) we show that, contrary to our expectations, parties do not use more negative campaigning during European elections. However, more extreme parties tend to use a more negative tone and fewer enthusiasm appeals during European than national elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies examining parties' attack behaviour, also called negative campaigning, largely neglect temporal dynamics. Therefoe, this paper examines how the electoral cycle, the period between two elections, impacts parties' attack behaviour in parliaments. We argue that parties attack all the time but that the (i) level, (ii) type, and (iii) nature of attacks are affected by the electoral cycle as parties adapt their objectives. Analysing longitudinal data on parties' attacks in the parliaments of Belgium, Croatia, and the UK (2010–2020), we find that when elections draw closer parties' use of attacks, trait attacks, and uncivil attacks increases. We also find support for the notion that not all parties' attack behaviour is equally impacted by the electoral cycle, as parties differ in sensitivity to the electoral cycle based on risk acceptance. Overall, the impact of the electoral cycle on parties' strategic choices in general, and attack behaviour specifically, should not be ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More aggressive campaigning styles focusing on criticizing opponents (negativity) or using inappropriate language to vilify opponents (incivility) tend to be disliked by voters, and remain thus risky for parties facing off in competitive elections. Backlashes against attackers often cancel out any dent the attacks may leave in the support for the targets. Yet, research on the conditions under which these backlashes are more likely to happen remains fragmentary. In this article, we argue that the nature of the electoral competition – specifically, the presence of viable alternative parties for voters to choose from – matters. Voters could be more likely to withdraw political support from the attacker when such alternatives exist. We test whether the availability and ideological attractiveness of alternatives intervene to explain the backlash effect associated with negativity and incivility, at the election, party, and voter levels. We do so comparatively in the context of the 2019 European Parliament elections in 27 EU countries, by linking a cross-sectional post-election survey (N = 18,790) with an expert survey covering the campaigning strategies of 175 parties that participated in the election across the continent. Estimating mixed effects multi-level models, we find support for the moderating effect of alternatives at the voter-level; voters who have at least equally attractive alternatives available to them are less likely to support parties that go negative than voters to whom the attacking party is the most viable option. Alternatives do not seem to play a major role, however, at the party and election levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how politicians' conflict framing strategies in online campaign advertisements affect citizens' political participation in a multi-party context. We rely on a unique combination of innovative research methods to do so, including a four-wave panel survey, a content analysis of Facebook browser-tracking data and a mobile experience sampling survey with data donations. All data were collected during the 2021 Dutch general elections. We find that conflict framing can discourage citizens from engaging in low-effort forms of political participation, such as discussing politics, signing a petition and visiting political websites. The results show that conflict frames can demobilize citizens because they lower enthusiasm and are perceived as less informative. Our study provides insights into the potential unintended consequences of using conflict framing as a campaign strategy in a multi-party setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TikTok is an influential social media platform. During the 2022 Australian Federal election, the major political parties used TikTok as a campaigning tool. This research analysed the TikTok videos from the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The analysis primarily considered how the posts use visibility labour and other TikTok-based performance tools. It was found that they actively engaged in visibility labour, and employed popular culture to frame political issues. For youth who may not be politically active, cultural references can serve as a shared symbolic resource, aiding them in navigating political expression. This makes such references crucial, as they can help engage young users. Although TikTok utilises a short-form approach, the videos can contain substantial content that has the power to persuade viewers. The ALP used popular culture trends and more traditional techniques such as negative campaigning and humour, to attract supporter attention, denigrate the opposition and, attract the attention of all voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical electoral behaviour theories have associated possible benefits of negative campaigning with two-party plurality systems due to their zero-sum nature. Nevertheless, negative campaigning is a widely used electoral strategy outside of these contexts, despite scant evidence of its benefits for political parties and candidates who employ it. Our research question is simple – is negative campaign messaging effective for attackers in multiparty systems with multimember districts? Or does it create a ‘boomerang effect’ in this context, for which the producer of the message faces a backlash? Multiparty systems with multimember districts should, according to the literature, be scenarios where the effects of negative campaigning are most complex if not unpredictable. This paper uses Facebook political messages to inform a survey experiment design that tests the effects of negative political messaging on voters. We employ this survey in Ireland, which uses the single transferable vote, an electoral system which magnifies outcome uncertainty for attackers. Our results suggest that negative messaging in this context produces both the intended effect and a boomerang effect for the sponsor of the message. These countervailing results suggest a net null effect for the efficacy of negative messaging.

The 2023 Turkish elections marked a historic juncture in the nation's political trajectory. Amidst economic, social, and political upheavals, coupled with a devastating earthquake, the elections served as a decisive evaluation of the newly inaugurated presidential system. With the incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) lagging in polls for the first time in over twenty years, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of the People's Alliance faced formidable opposition yet managed to score a victory in the second round. This article delves into the contrasting campaign strategies of the two leading candidates, Erdoğan and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. We argue that while Erdoğan's campaign leaned on negative tactics and exclusionary populism, emphasizing counter-terrorism, identity politics, and regime maintenance, Kılıçdaroğlu's strategy championed positive messaging buoyed by inclusive populism, spotlighting democratization, good governance, and regime change. Within an overarching competitive authoritarian context, these distinct strategies highlighted the intricate dynamics between campaign narratives and voter perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The People's List (Lista del Pueblo) was a group of independent candidates united on its anti-party sentiment that successfully participated in the Chilean elections to choose the constituents in charge of writing a new constitution. Based on the framework of negative political campaigns and through a deductive methodology and content analysis, this research looks at the strategy used in their televised spots (N = 357). Likewise, and through the study of the electoral database of this election, made up of 345 boroughs, the electoral bases of the People's List are established to explore relationships between the television campaign and its results according to political, socioeconomic, and sociodemographic aspects. The findings indicate that this group used the public television spot as a tactic based on an anti-establishment message, which had the purpose of channeling the demands of the social outbreak of October 2019 by promoting anger against the political and economic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the 2019 European Parliament campaign, we investigate parties' engagement in negative campaigning on Facebook and the relationship to a parties' ideology and their status as governing versus opposition party at the national level. Manual coding of 8,153 Facebook posts of parties from twelve European countries shows parties create less negative posts than positive and neutral ones. However, these negative posts attract more shares than positive, neutral, and balanced statements, which increases their prominence on the platform. Hence, users and algorithms create a negative campaign environment on Facebook to a greater extent than parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative campaigning in elections has received considerable attention. However, an important dimension of negative campaigning remains underexplored: the extent to which a candidate's presentation of self affects their likelihood of receiving negativity. Work on gender differences in self-personalization and media personalization also suggests that this effect might be shaped by candidate gender. This paper investigates if a candidate using personal details in the service of campaign promotion increases the likelihood that the candidate will receive negativity from an opponent and if this association is moderated by candidate gender. Using congressional campaign website data from 2002 to 2006, evidence does not suggest that candidates who personalize online are any more likely to receive online negativity. Further, findings suggest that only female candidates see their likelihood of receiving online negativity vary as a function of online self-personalization. Female candidates have a higher likelihood of receiving online negativity from their campaign opponent when the candidate is more personable—that is, when they make information about their private selves more publicly available for negative framing at the hands of their opponent. Robustness checks reveal that this effect is not time independent, however, suggesting the personalization-gender-negativity relationship may be conditional on electoral context. Implications for work on personalization and negative campaigning, the role of gender in these processes, and campaign risk-taking are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests the assumption that candidates' attack behavior is a result of their rational consideration of potential benefits and likely risks. Based on candidate surveys from three German state elections, we demonstrate that (i) attacks are an important strategy; (ii) on balance, candidates regard attacking opponents as a costly instead of a beneficial strategy; (iii) the differential between benefits and costs is positively associated with attack behavior; nevertheless, most candidates attack at least sometimes even when costs exceed benefits; (iv) candidate characteristics and the electoral context are rarely reflected in benefit-cost calculations; and (v) the theoretically assumed mediating role of the benefit-cost differential on attack behavior applies only to some explanatory factors. While the findings provide some evidence for rational choice explanations of negative campaigning, they also challenge some central assumptions. As such, they demonstrate the need for more comprehensive theoretical explanations and measurements of negative campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While studies investigating gendered ways of campaigning have primarily focused on negative campaign strategies, we explore the extent to which women and men engage in negative and positive campaigning and how they are combined. Our analyses, relying on the 2019 Finnish Parliamentary Candidates Survey, shows that even in the Finnish context, with comparatively high levels of gender equality in society and politics, distinct gender patterns in campaigning occur. Women candidates report having campaigned more positively than men candidates, while men candidates are more likely to report having campaigned negatively than women candidates. We also find that men are more inclined to incorporate a balanced mixture of positive and negative campaign messages, while women predominantly rely on positive campaigning. Based on our findings, we conclude that women and men still do not compete in politics on equal terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Iuris Stetinensis is the property of University of Szczecin Press / Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This thematic issue deals with the “negative” side of politics, more specifically with dynamics of political aggressiveness and ideological opposition in voters and elites. Why do candidates “go negative” on their rivals? To what extent are voters entrenched into opposing camps parted by political tribalism? And are these dynamics related to the (dark) personality of candidates and the expression of emotions in voters? A series of contributions written by leading and emerging scholars provide novel and groundbreaking empirical evidence along three main lines: (a) the evolution, causes, and consequences of political attacks and incivility by political elites; (b) the drivers and dimensions of affective polarization and negative voting in the public; and (c) the dynamics of candidate’s personality and perceptions, the affective roots of attitudes and behaviors. This thematic issue aims at setting the stage for a new research agenda on negative politics, able to generate new insights by triangulating evidence and approaches from strands of literature that have mostly evolved on separate tracks.

This study examined the conditions that motivate candidates to go negative during a parliamentary election campaign. We argue that by‐elections encourage candidates to engage in more negative campaigning. Three mechanisms might explain the alleged link: time pressure, media exposure, and voter turnout. Two main factors jointly determine which candidates rely heavily on negative campaigning during by‐elections: candidate characteristics and electoral competition. New data collected from press coverage of Taiwanese legislative elections (2008–2022), covering 318 campaigns in single‐member electoral districts, were analysed using the qualitative comparative analysis method. We modelled negative campaigning as a combination of a list of potential causal conditions. Thereafter, process‐tracing methods were applied to analyse a typical case to demonstrate the internal causal mechanism. The qualitative comparative analysis results and the case study indicate that increased electoral competition causes parachute candidates to criticise political opponents during a by‐election campaign, with less emphasis on their own policy proposals. These results suggest that researchers should pay close attention to important contextual factors that underlie candidates’ strategic choices, particularly during by‐elections.

This article examines the May 2023 regional and local elections in Spain. The vote confirmed the territorial retrenchment of the left-leaning national government coalition members (PSOE and UP) and sparked a call for snap general elections. The outcome of these sub-national elections was notably shaped by the divergent trajectories of the newer parties (Cs, UP, and Vox), as well as by the considerable increase in the support of the main opposition party (PP). This report shows how the existing high levels of political polarisation contributed to nationalising the campaign and electoral results in May 2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media are critical to election campaigns, but they also expose candidates to incivility and abuse. While there is a growing literature on online incivility faced by politicians, little is known about how campaign teams interpret and respond to it. To address that gap, we analyze in-depth interviews with 31 candidates and campaign staff from the 2019 federal election in Canada. We find that campaign teams interpret incivility according to the intensity of messages' content, but also their frequency, source, and target. They use these criteria to assess potential harms in three areas: security and psychological wellbeing, strategic campaign activities, and inclusive democratic discourse. Based on these assessments, campaign teams use a limited set of platform affordances to ignore, monitor, engage, or block uncivil voices. Our analysis shows that interpretations of incivility are more nuanced and multi-dimensional than most scholarship recognizes. We also reveal the often-hidden labor that campaign teams devote to content moderation, as they try to balance protecting themselves, defending their campaign messaging, and creating space for civil discussion. By paying closer attention to campaign teams' mediation and moderation of online incivility, scholars can better understand its consequences for democratic political participation in elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which candidates are more likely to go negative, and under which conditions? We analyze self-reported survey data from candidates having run in the 2017 German federal election for the main parties. More specifically, we test a comprehensive set of factors supposed to drive the use of (a) negative campaigning in general, (b) policy attacks, and (c) character attacks. Our results show that for all three versions of negative campaigning the political profile of candidates is most important, followed by personality traits, perceived campaign dynamics, social profile, and available campaign resources. Within these categories, five factors are important across the board: members of the governing parties are less likely to attack, 'extreme ideology' of the candidate fuels the use of attack politics, candidates who believe that the media can persuade voters attack more often, disagreeable candidates tend to go negative, and male candidates are more likely to attack than females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is mounting evidence in the United States and worldwide that highlights a widespread and deepening "principled dislike" between partisan groups. Stemming from group identity dynamics, such as "affective polarization," it is likely to be triggered by exposure to intra-elite conflicts, such as campaign negativity and incivility. However, empirical evidence for this effect is scarce, and it rests only on survey data; causal evidence linking campaign attacks and affective polarization is still missing. In this article, we advance the hypothesis that the effects of exposure to mediatized political attacks are likely mediated by how negative such attacks are perceived. To test our expectations, we leverage new evidence from an online experiment with convenience sample of American voters (N = 1,081). Our results suggest that exposure to intraelites' political attacks can drive affective polarization, but this unfolds mostly as a function of perceived negativity of those messages, and only for respondents that are ideologically affiliated with the target of the attack. Negativity is in the eye of the beholder, especially when one is being attacked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, negative campaigning is a permanent feature of political life. This often leads to situations where false or manipulated information determines the outcome of an election. Consequently, some countries have decided to significantly restrict the possibility of negative campaigning, as exemplified by Japanese or French legislation. The question can be asked whether similar bans would be worth introducing in Poland. One argument in favour of their introduction is the desire to increase the substantive level of electoral campaigning or to better ensure implementation of the principle of equal electoral opportunities. However, there are more arguments against such a ban. It would constitute a significant limitation of the principle of freedom of speech and, consequently, a limitation of the transparency of politics or the assurance of actual rivalry between political parties.

This thematic issue deals with the "negative" side of politics, more specifically with dynamics of political aggressiveness and ideological opposition in voters and elites. Why do candidates "go negative" on their rivals? To what extent are voters entrenched into opposing camps parted by political tribalism? And are these dynamics related to the (dark) personality of candidates and the expression of emotions in voters? A series of contributions written by leading and emerging scholars provide novel and groundbreaking empirical evidence along three main lines: (a) the evolution, causes, and consequences of political attacks and incivility by political elites; (b) the drivers and dimensions of affective polarization and negative voting in the public; and (c) the dynamics of candidate's personality and perceptions, the affective roots of attitudes and behaviors. This thematic issue aims at setting the stage for a new research agenda on negative politics, able to generate new insights by triangulating evidence and approaches from strands of literature that have mostly evolved on separate tracks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little comparative research on what causes candidates in elections across the world to 'go negative' on their rivals – mainly because of the scarcity of large-scale datasets. In this article, we present new evidence covering over 80 recent national elections across the world (2016–2018), in which more than 400 candidates competed. For the first time in a large-scale comparative setting, we show that, ceteris paribus, negativity is more likely for challengers, extreme candidates, and right-wing candidates. Women are not more (or less) likely to go negative on their rivals than their male counterparts, but we find that higher numbers of female MPs in the country reduces negativity overall. Furthermore, women tend to go less negative in proportional systems and more negative in majoritarian systems. Finally, negativity is especially low for candidates on the left in countries with high female representation, and higher for candidates on the right in countries with proportional representation (PR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties spend parts of their campaigns criticizing other parties' performance and characteristics, such as honesty, integrity, and unity. These attacks aim to negatively affect the target parties' electoral performance. But do they work? While attacks are informative, we argue that how voters react to negative campaigning depends on their partisanship. While the target's copartisans are more likely to get mobilized in favor of their party, the attacker's copartisans are expected to punish the target due to their respective partisan motivations. We expect null effects for attacks for partisans of third parties as well as nonpartisans. Combining a new dataset on campaign rhetoric with survey data from eight European countries, we show support for most but not all of our expectations. These results have important implications for the electoral campaigns literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly viewed that violence against politicians increases support for the victim's party. We revisit this conjecture drawing on evidence from an assassination of an opposition politician in Poland. First, we analyze engagement with Twitter content posted by opposition and government politicians using a difference-in-differences framework. Second, we use a public opinion survey collected in the days around the attack and compare party preferences of respondents interviewed just before and respondents interviewed just after the attack. Our results reveal decreased support for the victim's (opposition) party relative to support for the government. To explain this finding, we show that the opposition antagonized the public by engaging in negative campaigning against the government over their politician's assassination. Content analysis of tweets and news media confirms that citizens punished the opposition for their negative campaigning after the violence. Tentative evidence suggests that these effects could have had long-run political consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of studies shows that the reasons for competing candidates to "go negative" on their opponents during elections—that is, attacking their opponents instead of promoting their own programs or ideas stem from strategic considerations. Yet, existing research has, at this stage, failed to assess whether candidates' personality traits also play a role. In this article, we bridge the gap between existing work in political psychology and political communication and study to what extent the personality traits of competing candidates are linked with their use of negative campaigning strategies. We rely on candidate survey data for recent elections in three countries—Germany (2017), Switzerland (2019), and Finland (2019). The data includes self-reported measures for candidates' "Big Five" personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness) and the the use of attacks towards their opponents during the campaign. Controlling for the usual suspects driving the use of negative campaigning we show that this latter is associated with low agreeableness and (marginally) with high extraversion and low conscientiousness. The role of personality for the focus of an attack (issue vs. character attacks) is somewhat less clear-cut. All in all, kinder and more stable candidates tend to go less negative; when they do, they tend to stay away from character-based attacks and somehow focus on issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the effectiveness of negative campaigning offers mixed results. Negative messages can sometimes work to depress candidate evaluations, but they can also backfire against the attacker. In this article, we examine how humor can help mitigate the unintended effects of negative campaigning using data from three experimental studies in the United States and the Netherlands. Our results show that (1) political attacks combined with "other-deprecatory humor" (i.e., jokes against the opponents) are less likely to backfire against the attacker and can even increase positive evaluations of this latter—especially when the attack is perceived as amusing. At the same time and contrary to what we expected, (2) humor does not blunt the attack: humorous attacks are not less effective against the target than serious attacks. All in all, these results suggest that humor can be a good strategy for political attacks: jokes reduce harmful backlash effects against the attacker, and humoros attacks remain just as effective as humorless ones. When in doubt, be funny. All data and materials are openly available for replication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a rapid increase in attack politics and an inoculation approach is considered to be a promising strategy to resolve the problem. Inoculation theory posits that, through cognitive processing, the likelihood of resistance to attitude change can be enhanced by applying inoculation treatments containing threat components that motivate individuals to generate counter arguments. This study examines the efficacy of inoculation by employing inoculation strategies with a field experiment in an international context. The major hypotheses in this study were supported by empirical data. People receiving inoculation pretreatments conferred more resistance to attitude change following exposure to a political attack message. Moreover, people who had higher strength of support for candidates were more resistant to counter-attitudinal attacks. Further, this study assesses and discusses the nuances of inoculation theory and its applications, especially the implementation and potential of inoculation applications in international political campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The 2019 European Parliament elections were held in Spain in a context of political fragmentation and polarisation, following the recent incorporation of the extreme right into the national parliament. Elections to the European Parliament are considered second-order elections and are sometimes used by citizens to cast a punishment vote, favouring new political actors of a contestatary character to gain visibility. Social media networks such as Facebook play an important role because they offer these parties a space where they can disseminate their messages on equal terms, beyond media control. This study conducts a content analysis of the posts published on Facebook by Spanish national political parties in the month prior to the 2019 local, regional and European elections. The main goal is to analyse the communication strategy used by Spanish political parties in this social media, in order to find out the importance given by the parties to the European elections and whether there are differences in strategy at each level. The results reveal that the European elections are a third-order election for Spanish parties, behind local elections. Most parties practice a dual campaign, in which the topics, goals and emotions posted on Facebook vary according to the political level at which they are targeted. This tendency is more pronounced in populist parties and seems to be shaped by the national political context and aimed at matching the concerns of Spaniards at the European level. Despite the incorporation of the extreme right into the Spanish political chessboard, the negative Eurosceptic discourse is only present in the two populist parties and does not affect the rest of the political forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negativity in election campaign matters. To what extent can the content of social media posts provide a reliable indicator of candidates' campaign negativity? We introduce and critically assess an automated classification procedure that we trained to annotate more than 16,000 tweets of candidates competing in the 2018 Senate Midterms. The algorithm is able to identify the presence of political attacks (both in general, and specifically for character and policy attacks) and incivility. Due to the novel nature of the instrument, the article discusses the external and convergent validity of these measures. Results suggest that automated classifications are able to provide reliable measurements of campaign negativity. Triangulations with independent data show that our automatic classification is strongly associated with the experts' perceptions of the candidates' campaign. Furthermore, variations in our measures of negativity can be explained by theoretically relevant factors at the candidate and context levels (e.g., incumbency status and candidate gender); theoretically meaningful trends are also found when replicating the analysis using tweets for the 2020 Senate election, coded using the automated classifier developed for 2018. The implications of such results for the automated coding of campaign negativity in social media are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates how existing political and legal instruments can affect democratic power structures and civil society and examines prospects for their development. The article seeks to analyze current views and approaches related to negative campaigning, its sociopolitical perception, and countermeasures by looking at them through the lens of post‐Soviet countries and states within the Anglo‐Saxon legal tradition. Hence, the study views negative campaigning as a practice undermining democracy. We provide reliable evidence that Western nations are more likely to take a liberal approach to negative campaigning and assign it the role of a political struggle element. In addition, we found multiple confirmations that legislators in Russia have been toughening measures against negative campaigning and general defamation‐related rules. Related Articles: Caillier, James. 2010. "Citizen Trust, Political Corruption, and Voting Behavior: Connecting the Dots." Politics & Policy 38(5): 1015–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2010.00267.x Craig, Stephen C., and Paulina S. Rippere. 2014. "Political Trust and Negative Campaigns: Two Tests of the Figure‐Ground Hypothesis." Politics & Policy 42(5): 693–743. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12091 Jones, David A., Kathleen Ferraiolo, and Jennifer Byrne. 2011. "Selective Media Exposure and Partisan Differences about Sarah Palin's Candidacy." Politics & Policy 39(2): 195–221. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17471346.2011.00288.x [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are Eurosceptic parties more likely to run negative, uncivil and emotional campaigns, as it is often intuitively argued? And with what consequences? In this article, we shed light on the effectiveness of these campaign strategies for Eurosceptic parties during the 2019 European elections. We argue that 'harsher' campaigns are 'in character' for Eurosceptic parties, and are as such more likely to be electorally successful for them. We use data from the 2019 European Parliament Elections Expert Survey, covering 191 unique parties, and show that, indeed, Eurosceptic parties are more likely to campaign in a harsh way, and more likely than Europhile parties to benefit electorally from it. All data and materials are openly available for replication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the possibility that electoral campaigning transmits truthful information in a situation where campaigning has a direct persuasive effect on a subset of the electorate called "naïve voters." To this end, we construct a multi-sender signaling game in which an incumbent and a challenger decide whether to focus on policy or ability in electoral campaigning, and a media outlet then decides whether to gather news. Voters are divided into sophisticated and naïve voters. We demonstrate that a candidate's strategy regarding their issues of focus (campaign messages) can signal his or her private information. Specifically, negative campaigning against the incumbent's ability signals the incumbent's low ability in all separating equilibria. It is also noteworthy that separating equilibria exist only when sophisticated and naïve voters coexist. This implies that a fraction of naïve voters has a non-monotonic effect on the possibility of transmitting truthful information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an argumentative perspective on attacks in political election campaigns. The perspective highlights the role that attack ads play in the justification of vote claims aiming to advance our understanding of the notorious practice and to bring about a nuanced assessment of its benefits and risks. In the examination, special attention is paid to the argumentative potential that links a certain criticism of an adversary to the defense of the negative vote against the adversary as well as to the defense of the positive vote claim in favor of a campaign's candidate. Considering the argumentative potential is especially beneficial for capturing the role of attacks in important political processes, including accountability and the stimulation of an informed public political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do parties and candidates decide to go negative? Research usually starts from the assumption that this decision is strategic, and within this framework two elements stand out: the prospect of electoral failure increases the use of negative campaigning, and so does time pressure (little reaming time to convince voters before election day). In this article, we contribute to this framework by testing two new expectations: (i) political actors are more likely to go negative when they face unfavourable competitive standings and voting day is near; and (ii) they are less likely to go negative when they faced a substantive degradation in their competitive standing over the course of the campaign. We test these expectations on a rich database of newspaper ads about national referenda in Switzerland and provide preliminary empirical evidence consistent with those expectations. The results have important implications for existing research on the strategic underpinnings of campaigning and political communication.

We compare two alternative measures for assessing people's emotional reactions to political stimuli: the traditional self-report measure and facial expression analysis. We recruited participants to take part in a study examining reactions to a set of negative political commercials aired during the 2018 elections. We compare people's self-reporting of their emotional reactions to negative political advertisements with their expressed emotion, according to the facial expression analysis. We find the discriminant validity of the facial expression analysis is higher than the self-report measure. Second, the self-report and facial expression measures of emotion have little convergent validity: we fail to find a consistent and strong positive correlation between the self-report and facial software measures of the same emotion and the same political advertisement. Third, the facial software measure has better predictive validity than the self-report measure, generating better predictions for the three dependent variables examined: changes in political interest, changes in people's confidence in elected officials, and people's assessment of the tone of the senate campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much party communication encourages voters to lower issue-related evaluations of rival parties. Yet, studies of such influence are rare. Drawing on research on political parties' negative campaigning, this article starts to fill this gap. We triangulate evidence from four survey experiments across six issues in Denmark, the US, and Australia, and show that a party's negative campaigning decreases voters' evaluations of the target party's issue-handling competence (i.e. issue ownership), but does not backlash on voters' evaluations of the sponsor. Such attack on the target party does not have to be tied to a negative policy development like the crime rate to undermine the target party's competence evaluations. At the same time, a negative policy development only undermines a party's evaluations when it is accompanied by a rival party's negative campaigning attack. The implications for party competition and the mass-elite linkage are important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore mediated representations of parties' campaign interactions in multi-party systems. Actors in multi-party systems can engage with different actors on multiple issues. One crucial aspect of such engagement is the element of negativity—voicing criticisms of other actors' actions and policy proposals. This contribution argues that the media systematically exaggerate patterns of negativity based on issue ownership structures, such that attacks originating from or targeting issue owners are significantly more likely to be covered. We analyze a broad sample of news content from the 2013 Austrian national election campaign with generalized exponential random graph models to capture the complexities of mediated campaign negativity in a multi-party system while controlling for non-mediated campaign negativity. The results show that issue owners are more likely to be featured as attackers and targets in owned policy domains, suggesting a violation of the normative ideal of a fair representation of campaign interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an empirical study of young partisans’ and non-voters’ processing of attack ad messages utilised in the 2010 British general election. Expanding understanding of how these messages are processed is important because they can aid electoral and civic engagement, which is declining amongst youth. Currently, there is limited understanding of how youth process these ad messages and how they influence their engagement. We applied motivated reasoning to explore this in a national survey in England with 18- to 22-year-old British first-time voters, with data from 646 respondents presented in this article. Overall, our young partisans and non-voters employed motivated reasoning – (de)selection and critical appraisal – in their ad processing, thereby advancing understanding of how youth process attack election advertising. Concerns surrounding the use of attack election advertising emerge, suggesting the need for greater appraisal of the relevance of marketing in the development of election campaign strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Election campaigns in the age of social media are rapidly changing their character. Due to the declining party loyalty of voters, once stable constituencies have become increasingly volatile and the importance of campaigning has increased. Parties are now thought to be more likely than in the past to opt for negative campaigning. This paper examines the postings that parties or top candidates made on the social media sites Facebook and Twitter during the 2019 National Council election campaign. The results suggest that - at least on social media sites - the cost-benefit analysis of the parties might turn towards negative campaigning, as the average popularity of negative campaigning posts was higher than those that were not tagged with negative campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populists are often described as using a more aggressive, offensive, and anxiety-fuelled rhetoric than non-populists. Yet, little systematic evidence exists that this is the case. This article presents the first large-scale systematic study comparing the communication style of populists and non-populists worldwide, and introduces an original dataset based on expert ratings. The dataset contains systematic information for 195 candidates having competed in 40 national elections worldwide between June 2016 and June 2017. Results highlight that, controlling for "usual suspects" that drive negativity and emotional campaigns, populist campaigns are 15% more negative and contain 11% more character attacks and 8% more fear messages than campaigns of non-populist candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election campaigns in the age of social media are rapidly changing their character. Due to the declining party loyalty of voters, once stable constituencies have become increasingly volatile and the importance of campaigning has increased. Parties are now thought to be more likely than in the past to opt for negative campaigning. This paper examines the postings that parties or top candidates made on the social media sites Facebook and Twitter during the 2019 National Council election campaign. The results suggest that - at least on social media sites - the cost-benefit analysis of the parties might turn towards negative campaigning, as the average popularity of negative campaigning posts was higher than those that were not tagged with negative campaigning.

There are two targeting objectives for an election campaign: mobilizing core voters and chasing undecided voters. According to most previous research, negative campaigning exclusively fulfils a chasing function; parties use it to convince swing voters. The article argues that parties consider the mobilization of core voters as a second important function of negative campaigning. It is based on interviews with party campaign officials and a content analysis of election newspaper advertisements and press releases from the 2011 and 2015 Swiss National Council elections. The interviews and the analysis of parties' attack behaviour show that parties use negative campaigning for mobilizing purposes, and in the analysed Swiss elections, it seems to be a more popular strategy than chasing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During election campaigns, parties attack each other's nonideological traits such as competence and integrity. However, it is unclear to what extent valence attacks reduce voter support for the target party. Drawing from theories on left-right personality and associated cognitive flexibility, we argue that valence attacks harm the electoral performance of leftist but not rightist parties. The relative openness of leftist voters makes them more willing to accept negative information about their party and act on it. In contrast, the relative closedness of rightist voters makes them less likely to reconsider their political preferences in the face of negative information. We find robust evidence for our argument at the aggregate and individual levels, using original data on media coverage of party campaigns in 10 European countries. We also provide experimental evidence in support of our argument. The findings have important implications for research on nonideological rhetoric in party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether parties' issue attacks can successfully discredit their rivals' issue evaluations. Existing research demonstrates how a party can influence voters' perceptions of itself on a single dimension of issue competition, but research showing the impact of negative campaigning on parties' issue evaluations remains limited. Based on novel experimental evidence, we test the impact of three different types of issue attacks – attacking the rival's position, competence, or commitment on the issue – on voters' evaluations of the rival party on three issue dimensions, namely position, competence, and commitment. The findings indicate that commitment and position attacks depress the rival party's issue evaluations on that dimension, whereas competence attacks do not. Moreover, positional attacks lower position evaluations and competence evaluations but increase commitment evaluations. Finally, the effectiveness of attacks varies between issues, and party preference moderates the effects of issue attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that, above and beyond the usual suspects, some campaign strategies are more successful in attracting media coverage. We specifically focus on two elements of campaign content: the tone of the campaign (i.e., whether or not to go "negative" on opponents) and the use of emotional appeals (fear and enthusiasm messages). We argue that both negativity and emotions matter for media coverage. We rely on an original comparative data set about the campaign strategies of 507 candidates having competed in 107 elections in 89 countries worldwide between 2016 and 2019. The data set is based on a survey distributed to samples of national and international experts. Confirming our expectations, the analyses reveal that candidates using a more negative tone and, especially, candidates making a greater use of emotional appeals receive a greater media coverage; the effect of emotional appeals dwarfs all other drivers of media coverage. Our analyses also show that media coverage is significantly higher for candidates who go negative and use fear appeals, and when candidates go positive and use enthusiasm appeals. Finally, media coverage is significantly greater for candidates who go negative in countries where the media system has a marked preference for infotainment and sensationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election campaigns in hybrid media systems are characterised by the integration of newer and older media. With the rise of social media platforms, newer tools of political communication emerge, such as online campaign posters, complementing older tools, such as traditional campaign posters. This raises the question whether the newer medium online campaign posters replicates strategies of professionalised political communication (i.e. personalisation, de-ideologisation and negative campaigning), and whether major and minor parties differ in their use of these strategies in online campaign posters. Against this background, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of visual and textual elements of online campaign posters and traditional campaign posters (N = 1,069) for the 2013 and 2017 German Bundestag elections. The results indicate that online campaign posters are significantly more negative than traditional campaign posters. Moreover, the use of online campaign posters tends to moderate the inter-party competition in the social media environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]