Negative Campaigning in a Multiparty System

Hansen, Kasper Møller; Pedersen, Rasmus T.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9477.2008.00213.x

Cited by 84 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…The fact that the findings concerning hypotheses 1 and 2 conclude to previous results of studies on party-controlled communication channels conducted in multiparty systems across Western Europe such as Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands (Elmelund-Praestekaer 2011; Hansen and Pedersen 2008;Schweitzer 2010) supports the generalizability of the findings.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Negative Campaigning in Party-Controlled Communication Channels: Party Communication Strategies in Campaign Posters, Newspaper Advertisement, and Press Releases during the 2008 Austrian National Election Campaign

Rußmann¹

2014

Journal of Political Marketing

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Politicians and people professionally involved in politics agree that negative campaigning is a frequently used campaign communication strategy by Austrian political parties. Yet, there is no empirical investigation of such claims. The present study examines party-controlled communication channels to identify the use of negative messaging strategies from a political actor's perspective. The data for this study come from a 6-week content analysis of campaign posters, newspaper advertisement and press releases of the 2008 Austrian National Elections. I examine the degree, source, target, and type of negativity. Results show that there are great differences in the degree and type of negativity between the three communication channels. Whereas in press releases all Austrian parties constantly engaged in going negative, campaign posters hardly contained any negative message. To a great extent negative campaign tactics are adjusted depending to whom the message is addressed to in the first place, the voter or the media. Concerning the source and target of negative appeals, results show

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Negative Campaigning in Party-Controlled Communication Channels: Party Communication Strategies in Campaign Posters, Newspaper Advertisement, and Press Releases during the 2008 Austrian National Election Campaign

Rußmann¹

2014

Journal of Political Marketing

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“…This is an obvious but important advantage compared with other modes of communication used by scholars so far. The analysis of media reports, for instance, does not capture party behavior directly but observes what journalists write about it (Elmelund-Praestekaer and Molgaard-Svensson 2014; Hansen and Pedersen 2008). Journalists may interpret actions by parties in a way that was actually not intended.…”

Section: Empirical Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Campaigning and the Logic of Retaliation in Multiparty Competition

Dolezal

Ennser‐Jedenastik

Müller

2016

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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The extant literature has demonstrated that the logic of retaliation is a core feature of negative campaigning. Attacks by one side induce counterattacks by the other. Yet most research on the interactive nature of negative campaigning is limited to two-party competition and provides little theoretical justification for why political actors should respond to attacks with counterattacks. The present paper addresses these research gaps. We argue that the negativity bias in human information processing and the zero-sum nature of elections make retaliation a rational strategy. Importantly, these arguments also imply that retaliation may not be the only plausible response to attacks in multiparty systems. Rather, parties may prefer to react to attacks from one competitor by attacking another. To grasp empirically how being attacked and attacking are related, we conduct a highly disaggregated time series analysis of such instances while controlling for other factors that may influence actor behavior. Our analyses draw on several thousand party press releases issued during three national election campaigns in Austria, a typical European multiparty system. They show that retaliation is an important strategy also in multiparty politics. Yet in such context, parties do not exclusively follow a tit-for-tat approach but rather display more complex patterns of attack behavior.

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“…34 We cannot determine to which attacker a candidate was responding in the WiscAds data. 35 In the 2005 Danish election containing 10 advertising parties, Hansen and Pedersen (2008) report that 8 percent of advertisements featured in 114 newspapers were exclusively negative. (1) and (2) Duopoly is defined using the N π 10% measure where candidates who came with at least 10% of the final vote share are "viable competitors".…”

Section: Appendix A: Data Appendixmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Advertising and Political Competition

2015

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Why is negative advertising such a prominent feature of competition in the US political market? We hypothesize that two-candidate races provide stronger incentives for going negative relative to non-duopoly contests: when the number of competitors is greater than two, airing negative ads creates positive externalities for opponents that are not the object of the attack. To investigate the empirical relevance of the fewness of competitors in explaining the volume of negative advertising, we exploit variation in the number of entrants running for US non-presidential primaries from 2000 through 2008. Duopolies are over twice as likely to air a negative ad when compared to non-duopolies, and the tendency for negative advertising decreases in the number of competitors. The estimates are robust to various specification checks and the inclusion of potential confounding factors at the race, candidate, and advertisement levels. * We thank

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Negative Campaigning in a Multiparty System

Cited by 84 publications

References 40 publications

Negative Campaigning in Party-Controlled Communication Channels: Party Communication Strategies in Campaign Posters, Newspaper Advertisement, and Press Releases during the 2008 Austrian National Election Campaign

Negative Campaigning in Party-Controlled Communication Channels: Party Communication Strategies in Campaign Posters, Newspaper Advertisement, and Press Releases during the 2008 Austrian National Election Campaign

Negative Campaigning and the Logic of Retaliation in Multiparty Competition

Negative Advertising and Political Competition

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