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

Abstract

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.

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

“…Further research needs to account for this heterogeneous relationship between party, campaign tone and electoral success – particularly keeping in mind that the targets of political attacks, which we were unable to investigate here, are likely to matter as well. Increasing evidence shows that the dynamics of attack politics are interactive ones (Dolezal et al, 2016; Somer-Topcu and Weitzel, 2020), and that the effectiveness of political attacks depends on the characteristics of both the sponsor of the attacks and their target.…”

Parties’ attack behaviour in parliaments: Who attacks whom and when

“…Two underlying gaps can be identified. First, parties are incentivised to attack on policy and/or trait to obtain vote (e.g., Somer‐Topcu & Weitzel, 2022) and office (e.g., Walter et al., 2014) goals during campaigns, whereas outside campaigns, policy goals also become relevant (e.g., Otjes & Louwerse, 2018). In other words, while in campaigns parties attack their rivals expecting to gain support of the electorate ( vote ) and a potential seat in the cabinet ( office ), outside campaigns, they may also engage in attacks trying to, for example, place issues high on the agenda (Green‐Pedersen & Mortensen, 2010) or secure ownership over an issue (Walgrave & De Swert, 2007).…”

“…Attacks between political actors can take place on several levels (between individuals, parties, group of parties), but they are always driven by the underlying party competition logic, in which vote (e.g., Somer‐Topcu & Weitzel, 2022), office (e.g., Walter et al., 2014) and policy (e.g., Otjes & Louwerse, 2018) goals are the main objectives. For example, recent studies have shown that attacking actors on policies may lower voters’ perceptions of the targeted actor (Lefevere et al., 2020; Seeberg & Nai, 2021).…”

“…There are reasons to expect different dynamics to take place in parliaments. During campaigns, parties are driven by vote and office goals when they engage in attack behaviour (e.g., Somer‐Topcu & Weitzel, 2022; Walter et al., 2014) while in parliaments, policy goals such as placing issues high on the agenda or acquiring ownership over an issue also take the stage (e.g., Green‐Pedersen & Mortensen, 2010; Otjes & Louwerse, 2018; Walgrave & De Swert, 2007). Furthermore, ordinary party members are more prominent in parliaments than in campaigns (since campaigns are usually dominated by the party leadership), which can facilitate intra‐party conflicts (or dissent; see Kam, 2009).…”

How Partisanship Matters: A Panel Study on the Democratic Outcomes of Perceived Dirty Campaigning

“…However, studying partisanship in this context is important, because it can lead to variability in individual reactions to campaigns (Druckman et al, 2019;Fridkin & Kenney, 2011). Research on the role of partisanship investigated negative campaigning as an umbrella term rather than specifically uncivil campaigning and deceitful campaign techniques (e.g., Haselmayer et al, 2020;Nai, 2013;Somer-Topcu & Weitzel, 2022).…”