Beyond American negativity: toward a general understanding of the determinants of negative campaigning

Abstract

This article supplements and further develops the almost exclusively American literature on the determinants of negative campaigning by analyzing the tone of the Danish parties' election campaigns. It concludes that proximity to governmental power matters, as oppositional parties are more negative than incumbents. This is comparable to the American experiences. The prospect of electoral failure, however, does not affect the tone the same way as poor poll standings do in the US. Moreover, it is suggested that future studies of negativity might consider how different party organizations affect the campaign tone; at least this study finds indications that parties with large proportions of party identifiers are slightly more negative than other parties. Finally, it is found that parties campaign differently in different channels of communication; that is, they are generally more negative in channels that allow direct interaction among politicians. This finding poses the question whether some channels are better empirical sources for studies of negativity than others, which is addressed in the closing section of the article.

Mobilizing and chasing: The voter targeting of negative campaigning – lessons from the Swiss case

“…The two data sources for the content analysis are newspaper advertisements and press releases. As we are interested in the targets of negative campaigns rather than in the general level of negativity in Swiss election campaigns our data sources include the more confrontational communication channels and ignore sources which can be expected to contain fewer negative appeals such as party manifestos (Elmelund-Praestekaer, 2010). This study uses newspaper ads rather than the often-analysed TV ads because the latter are forbidden in Switzerland.…”

Fear and Loathing in Populist Campaigns? Comparing the Communication Style of Populists and Non-populists in Elections Worldwide

“…Our models are controlled by several relevant covariates that have been shown to affect campaigning style. At the candidate level, incumbents have been shown as less likely than challengers to go negative (Lau and Pomper 2004) and to use fear appeals (Brader 2006); candidates facing a prospect of electoral defeat should, instead, have stronger incentives to attack (Skaperdas and Grofman 1995;Elmelund-Praestekaer 2010), and so do candidates far from the ideological center (Walter, van der Brug, and van Praag 2014); some scattered evidence also exists that candidates on the right are more likely to go negative (Lau and Pomper 2001) and use fear appeals (Ridout and Searles 2011). Unfortunately, no existing dataset provides information about the left-right positioning of parties and candidates worldwideat least, no dataset exists that covers the full scope of our data.…”

“…Models presented in Table 2 confirm some trends discussed in the negative campaigning literature. Incumbents are less likely to go negative (Lau and Pomper 2004;Walter and Nai 2015), whereas more extreme candidates and candidates on the right-hand end of the ideological spectrum are more likely to attack (Lau and Pomper 2001;Elmelund-Praestekaer 2010;Walter, van der Brug, and van Praag 2014). Two characteristics of the context also seem to matter: campaigns are more positive and attacks are more policy-based during competitive elections (Francia and Herrnson 2007), whereas the opposite is true when media cover elections through a "conflict" frame that puts a special emphasis on conflicts between candidates, personalization, and infotainmentwhat Moffitt (2016: 77) calls "dramatization, polarisation, and prioritisation of conflict.…”

The 2012 French electoral campaign: Tools to understand campaign dynamics

“…The main observation they draw from this content analysis is that the candidates were mainly focused on criticizing other candidates rather than presenting their own personal qualities or their manifestos. The authors labelled this phenomenon a 'spiral of negativity' (Elmelund-Praestekaer, 2010). Out of the five most important candidates, only the centerright candidate (Francois Bayrou -Modem) did not build his communication primarily on criticism (19.5 per cent of the overall electoral communication) but rather on his values, programme and personality.…”