Abstract
We present a model of political campaigning where a candidate chooses between promoting oneself (positive campaign) or attacking the rival (negative campaign). Candidates vary only by quality. Campaign choices determine the subject of public deliberation: If a candidate runs a positive campaign and his rival a negative campaign, the voters learn the quality of the “focal” candidate. Thus, negative campaigns may be used either to expose the rival candidate (informative role) or to turn attention away from oneself (non-informative role). The effect of negative campaigns depends on whether it is faced with another negative campaign (cross talk) or a positive campaign (fruitful debate). We suggest that in order to ascertain the effect of negative advertising, studies should take into account the campaigns employed by both candidates. Voter beliefs about candidate quality plays a major role in campaign selection: while the incidence of negative campaigning goes down as the prior probability of a candidate being good increases, the probability of selection of the correct candidate is non-monotonic in the said prior.
Highlights
Electoral campaigns are possibly the most important element of voters’ information about the candidates
While every electoral campaign involves a large number of positive, negative and comparative messages, we shall characterize the overall theme of a campaign as broadly positive or negative, and it is the choice of this theme that we shall examine in this paper
Our main premise is that if one candidate decides to highlight why he is suitable and the other argues why his rival is unsuitable, the former candidate is the focal one in the electoral race: The public learns more about quality of the former than about the latter one
Summary
Electoral campaigns are possibly the most important element of voters’ information about the candidates. We study the candidate’s decision to focus on one of two decidedly aggregate issues: Matters pertaining to one’s own suitability for office vs those pertaining to the rival’s quality Such a model allows us to analyze conditions under which negative advertising is used to inform the electorate or to muddle the debate. Each campaign spends time and money in finding negative information about the rival Such efforts capture a range of things from researching the rival candidate’s voting records and personal history to privately polling sections of the electorate in order to find out about how the public views the rival’s positions on salient issues. We embed in our model two features of such espionage: First, it is costly, and second, it is almost always clandestine.
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