Measures of Campaign Negativity: Comparing Approaches and Eliminating Partisan Bias

Abstract

We compare measures of the tone of parties' campaigns in the 2015 General Election in England, based on, respectively, coverage of parties' campaigns in six national newspapers, citizens' perceptions, and expert judgements. It is the most extensive study of such measurements outside the U.S. and one of very few to include expert judgements. We find that citizen perceptions and expert judgements are heavily affected by partisan bias. We show how these biases can be eliminated with a regression-based procedure. After such adjustment seven of the eight resulting measures of parties' campaign tone (five based on newspapers, one on citizen perceptions and one on expert judgements) are strongly correlated. The eighth measure (based on one of the newspapers) depicts the tone of parties' campaigns very differently owing to different criteria of what to cover in a campaign. Each of the three kinds of empirical information is adequate as a basis for measuring parties' campaign tone, but adjustment for partisan biases is essential for perception and judgement data. Common apprehensions about the 'subjectivity' of citizen perceptions are not to be justified, while expert judgements are equally useful, as long as sufficient information is available to eliminate their partisan bias.

Attack politics from Albania to Zimbabwe: A large-scale comparative study on the drivers of negative campaigning

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Euroscepticism and the use of negative, uncivil and emotional campaigns in the 2019 European Parliament election: A winning combination

“…As the tables show, the average expert profile only marginally comes into play.Even more importantly, all of the results described above are robust after controlling for sample composition. Nonetheless, to exclude the effects of expert ideology even further, we have replicated the main analyses using an 'adjusted' measure of campaign harshness, inspired by a procedure described in Walter and Van der Eijk (2019). The adjusted measure is obtained, for each party, by: (a) regressing their value on the campaign harshness index on the difference between the average expert left-right position and the party's ideological profile (i.e.…”

Negative Campaigning and Vote Choice in Europe: How Do Different Partisan Groups React to Campaign Attacks?

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