Negative Political Campaigning Research Articles

Television Campaigns in the Chilean Constituent Elections: The Negative and Anti-system Discourse in the Success of the Social Movement La Lista Del Pueblo and its Electoral Base

ABSTRACT 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.

Delegitimizing the Egyptian Regime: Negative Campaigning and Strategic Framing as Techniques to Demobilize Antagonists

Islamist social movements are vital players in MENA’s political arena. This study explores how these movements attempt to delegitimize their rivals and the frames they assign to them in hotly contested situations. For this purpose, this study used content analysis to analyze the entire range of Arabic language communiqués issued by the Muslim Brotherhood from July 2013 to January 2019. The theoretical framework is based on negative campaigning literature and two concepts of social movements theory; legitimacy as a crucial moral resource and strategic framing as a technique to demobilize antagonists. This article demonstrates that the Brotherhood conducted a negative campaign to incriminate and undermine the post-2013 order and damage its image, credibility, and reputation. As part of this campaign, the movement deployed many strategies and negative frames to give harmful meaning to the regime, its institutions, ideas, and leaders. This study contributes to research in political communication by deepening the understanding of strategic framing as a technique to demobilize antagonists and demonstrating how moral resources lie at the heart of negative political communication campaigns. It argues that the Brotherhood uses strategic framing to raise doubts about the regime’s authenticity and sincerity.

When Politics Disgust: Emotional versus Rational Processing of Attack Ads

ABSTRACT Following the 2016 Presidential election, 82% of respondents felt disgusted with politics. This revulsion persisted into the 2020 Presidential campaign with voters reporting avoidance of voting and increased disgust with the opposition. Previous political research has noted a moderate negative correlation between negative political campaigning and trust in government and mixed findings on voting intentions. We make a distinction between emotional versus rational processing of political attack ads and use that distinction to demonstrate that emotional processing of these ads evokes disgust and accordingly avoidance of voting and decreased trust in government. Moreover, disgust evoked by political attack advertisements is transferred to politics in general, dampening voting intentions, trust in government, and in the short term political aspirations. This research helps explain previous mixed findings in the negative political campaigning literature and suggests how emotional processing and the disgust response are alienating portions of the electorate.

Stealing Thunder in Negative Political Advertising: The Persuasive Impact of One-sided and Two-sided Negative Messages on Partisan Individuals

Although two-sided persuasion is a common technique in political speeches, few research has reported the relative persuasiveness of a one-versus two-sided message in the context of negative political advertising. Participants ( N = 116) viewed a negative political ad, varying in message sidedness (one-sided vs. two-sided) and partisan match (partisan-match vs. partisan-mismatch vs. unaffiliated). Multivariate results revealed the relative advantage of two-sided persuasion in the partisan-match condition where participants viewed a negative ad targeting their supporting party candidate. One-sided persuasion was more effective in the partisan-mismatch condition where participants viewed a negative ad criticizing the opposition party candidate. Implications for the practice of strategic negative political campaigns were discussed.

The Macro-Level Driving Factors of Negative Campaigning in Europe

Covering the largest sample of countries to date, this study examines the effect of three country-specific factors on the tone of electoral campaigns across Europe: electoral system disproportionality, party system fragmentation, and the polarization of the electorate. We use an original dataset of statements made by political actors during eighteen electoral campaigns in nine European countries. Our multinomial logit model suggests that increasing disproportionality slightly increases negativity, while thanks to parties competing on the same market, less polarized electorates invite more negative political campaigns. Finally, we find a U-shaped relationship between party system fragmentation and negativity: Increasing the number of parties, negativity decreases first, only to start increasing again once the party system becomes very fragmented. We explain this with parties altering their coalition strategies with the changing number of parties: Less fragmentation makes it more likely to having to step into coalition with the competitors, thus decreasing negativity, while in very fragmented systems, parties not needed to any potential coalitions become easy targets to negative campaign.

Impact of negative political campaigns on the effectiveness of communication (cognition, emotions and voting behavior)

Impact of negative political campaigns on the effectiveness of communication (cognition, emotions and voting behavior)

네거티브 정치캠페인의 성공과 실패: 연구흐름의 정리 및 케이스 비교 분석

네거티브 정치캠페인의 성공과 실패: 연구흐름의 정리 및 케이스 비교 분석

Negativity in a Twitter Age: How Politicians are Adapting to Social Media

This study investigates negative campaigning and issue preferences as reflected in the use of Twitter posts released during the 2011-2012 presidential primaries. Negative political campaigning and policy-centered voting have become more prevalent in recent years, especially with the advent of the Internet and the subsequent increase in media sources such as blogs and social media platforms. Because voters use the Internet more than ever, it is important to study the types of material candidates disseminate to the public and the degree of negativity included in such content. Findings indicate that runner-up candidates were not more likely to use negativity in tweets in our sample.

Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?

Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?

Negative Campaigning across Different Communication Channels: Different Ball Games?

In this article, the authors address the question of to what extent negative political campaigning differs when looking at different communication channels. They compare paid publicity, election debates, and newspaper coverage for the 2006 Dutch parliamentary elections and conduct an elaborate content analysis. Results show that the level of negative campaigning does not differ greatly across these channels, although election debates clearly show the highest amount of this type of campaigning. Notably, negative campaigning takes a different form in newspaper coverage, where appeals are more personal, focusing on character traits as opposed to being directed to political parties and dealing with political issues. The authors explain those results by pointing to the different levels of control politicians exert over communication channels. They also make a plea to other researchers investigating negative campaigning, asking them to fully consider that their results might be seriously biased by the communication channel they investigate.

The Implicit and Explicit Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: Is the Source Really Blamed?

Despite the widespread use of negative campaigns, research has not yet provided unambiguous conclusions about their effects. So far studies, however, have mainly focused on very explicit measures. The main goal of the present work was to explore the effects of different types of negative campaigns on both implicit and explicit attitudes, as well as in relation to two basic dimensions of social perception, namely competence and warmth. Across a series of three studies, we basically showed that not all negative campaigns lead to the same consequences. Specifically, especially personal attacks toward the opposing candidate may backfire at the explicit level. More interestingly, at an implicit level, the reliance on negative messages was associated with more negative spontaneous affective responses toward the source, but also with a spontaneous conformity to such a source. Overall, it appeared that negative messages decreased the perceived warmth of the source while simultaneously increasing the perceived competence. Results are discussed by focusing on the importance of implicit measures in political psychology and on the crucial role of perceived competence.

Finessing a point: augmenting the core

The “finesse point” introduced here extends the notion of a core; it is a position that minimizes what a candidate needs to do to counter moves that are made by an opponent. The definition, which is motivated by the “chaos theorem” as well as by the dynamics of positive and negative political campaigning, is also used to define a “malicious point,” which is an optimal location from which a candidate can engage in “negative campaigning.”

Contest with Attack and Defence: Does Negative Campaigning Increase or Decrease Voters' Turnout?

We present a general model of two players contest with two types of efforts. Contrary to the classical models of contest, where each player chooses a unique effort, and where the outcome depends on the efforts of all the players, contestants are allowed to reduce the effort of the opponent. Defence increases one's chance of winning while attack annihilates the defence of the opponent. This model has many applications like political campaigning, wars, competition among lobbies, job promotion competitions, or sport contests. We study the general model of contest with attacks and defence and propose an application to negative political campaigns, where two candidates arbitrate between disparaging their opponent or enhancing their own image. We propose sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a symmetric Nash equilibrium of the contest game. In the application, we contribute to the empirically debated question dealing with the effect of attack on voters turnout, and show that the conclusion depends on the distribution of voters sensitivity to defence and attack. Furthermore, contrary to the literature, we show that an underdog candidate may be less aggressive than his opponent.

The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment

The conventional wisdom about negative political campaigning holds that it works, i.e., it has the consequences its practitioners intend. Many observers also fear that negative campaigning has unintended but detrimental effects on the political system itself. An earlier meta-analytic assessment of the relevant literature found no reliable evidence for these claims, but since then the research literature has more than doubled in size and has greatly improved in quality. We reexamine this literature and find that the major conclusions from the earlier meta-analysis still hold. All told, the research literature does not bear out the idea that negative campaigning is an effective means of winning votes, even though it tends to be more memorable and stimulate knowledge about the campaign. Nor is there any reliable evidence that negative campaigning depresses voter turnout, though it does slightly lower feelings of political efficacy, trust in government, and possibly overall public mood.

Mexicans' Responses Toward Televised Political Ads During 2006 Presidential Election

The objective of this research is to illustrate the effect of message strategy on Mexicans' responses toward televised political advertising campaigns during the 2006 presidential election. To achieve the purpose of the study, two focus groups were conducted to assist in understanding the effect that message strategies, whether negative or positive, have on a voter's response to televised political advertising. In particular, the authors explored to what extend positive and negative advertisements affect the voter's cognition, emotions, and attitude towards the candidate. Overall, the observations obtained in this study support previous findings, which suggested that apathy to political campaigns are due to the growing cynicism developed through negative political campaigns.

Mudslingers: the top 25 negative political campaigns of all time: countdown from no. 25 to no. 1

Mudslingers: the top 25 negative political campaigns of all time: countdown from no. 25 to no. 1

News Coverage of Negative Political Campaigns

The present experiment examines the effects of negative campaigns on voting participation and preference over which previous studies have provided inconsistent findings. This study focuses on the impact of negative campaigns covered in the news rather than those delivered in political advertising. Findings do not support an across-the-board “negativity-demobilization” hypothesis but demonstrate that the focus of campaign (i.e., policy-versus personality-focused) moderates the impact of campaign attacks on the likelihood of turning out to vote. While policy-based attacks covered in the news slightly stimulate voter turnout, personality attacks significantly depress one’s participatory intention. The data also indicate that negative strategies generally do not benefit the sponsoring candidates, and it is even more so when attacks concern personal matters. In general, voters appear to prefer a policy-appealing candidate over a personality-appealing one.

Cancellation and Focus Model of Choice and Preferences for Political Candidates

Political voter choices, although obviously much studied, have seen relatively little application in formal models of decision making. This study examines the political domain from the perspective of one such model: cancellation and focus. The cancellation and focus model describes a feature-matching comparison process for preference choices in which features shared by the choice alternatives are cancelled, and greater weight is placed on the unique features of the alternative that is the subject, or starting point, of the comparison. This model proposes that the result of a comparison between two objects will depend not only on the features or aspects of those objects, but also on how these features or aspects are recruited and weighted for use in the comparison. As predicted by the model, for candidate pairs with unique good features, the candidate providing the subject of the comparison was preferred, while for candidate pairs with unique bad features, the candidate acting as the target of the comparison was preferred. Further, when candidate descriptions were encountered as a part of unique-good pairs they received higher postchoice evaluations than when those identical candidate descriptions were encountered as part of unique-bad pairs. Implications of the cancellation and focus model of choice for negative political campaigning are discussed.

Campaign Tactics and the Decision to Attack

Research on negative political campaigning can be sorted into two groups: formal theory that designs optimal campaign strategies, and empirical work that explores the consequences of negative ads on the motivation of voters. This paper establishes a link between these two approaches using a series of thought experiments involving political consultants. We design a variety of hypothetical campaigns that mimic theoretically distinct questions and ask a nationwide sample of political consultants to place themselves in each of these campaigns and to make tactical decisions. We then compare the consultants' responses with theory With the ability to manipulate our hypothetical campaigns, we can explore the political applicability of different theoretical models. We also examine party differences; that is, whether consultants who work for Democratic candidates advise more or less attack politics than Republican consultants.

Negative political campaigning

It seems to be increasingly taken for granted by politicians and commentators that it is more effective to attack one's opponent than to promote a positive vision in order to sway voters in an election campaign. This article examines the relevant evidence in the psychological literature to see if this belief is justified. This includes the evidence on information processing, emotion and the specific effects of negative campaigning.