Negative campaigning and electoral competition
Abstract
Political negative advertising is an important aspect of electoral campaigning, and has attracted increasing interest among scholars over the past decades. Negative campaigning is the general term that includes all the advertisements and speeches from one candidate that refer to the opponent's policy and personal attributes. Positive campaigning, instead, refers to all the advertisements and speeches from one candidate that are related to his or her personal and political attributes. In this dissertation, I first (Chapter 1) analyze data on the negative tone of the campaign and compare them to the findings in the literature. I am interested in understanding which candidate is more likely to employ more negative campaigning, under which conditions, and if voters' turnout is to some extent affected by it. The pattern that emerges is pretty clear but not always in line with previous findings: incumbents do the least amount of negative campaigning, challengers do the most. The position in the polls does not affect how much negative campaigning is employed by either incumbents or challengers. On the other hand, in open elections, candidates who are expecting to lose do more negative campaigning. There is no strong evidence for a party effect in the employment of negative campaigning. Finally, I find that the tone of the campaign does not affect turnout. I then (Chapter 2) propose a possible explanation for some of these facts, through a model of spatial electoral competition in which voters are unsure about candidates' policy position. Candidates run on their own record, which is assumed to be known, in expectations, by the electorate. They can use both negative and positive messages to change voters' common perception about the variance of their policy position. Voters are risk averse and, ceteris paribus, prefer candidates with lower variance. I find, in particular, that incumbents employ negative campaigning less than challengers. Similarly, favorite candidates employ negative campaigning less than their opponents. Finally, the overall fraction of negative campaigning in open elections and in elections with an incumbent is the same.
Recommended Citation
Massimiliano Landi,
"Negative campaigning and electoral competition"
(January 1, 2004).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI3138042.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3138042
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