Positive Spillovers from Negative Campaigning

Abstract

Negative advertising is frequent in electoral campaigns, despite its ambiguous effectiveness: negativity may reduce voters' evaluation of the targeted politician but have a backlash effect for the attacker. We study the effect of negative advertising in electoral races with more than two candidates with a large scale field experiment during an electoral campaign for mayor in Italy and a survey experiment in a fictitious mayoral campaign. In our field experiment, we find a strong, positive spillover effect on the third main candidate (neither the target nor the attacker). This effect is confirmed in our survey experiment, which creates a controlled environment with no ideological components nor strategic voting. The negative ad has no impact on the targeted incumbent, has a sizable backlash effect on the attacker, and largely benefits the idle candidate. The attacker is perceived as less cooperative, less likely to lead a successful government, and more ideologically extreme.

Violence Against Politicians, Negative Campaigning, and Public Opinion: Evidence From Poland

“…Despite an extensive set of studies on the topic, evidence on the effects of negative campaigning on party support remains mixed (Lau et al, 2007;Tavits & Jung, 2021). Our study provides additional support for recent studies showing that negative campaigning can actually backfire (Galasso et al, 2020;Morisi, 2018). We suggest a possible way to reconcile this finding with earlier, opposite results.…”

“…Our approach, leveraging short-run variation and high-frequency data, thus overcomes limitations of previous studies that either rely on correlational evidence (e.g., Iqbal & Zorn, 2008), or estimate the effect of assassinations by comparing successful assassinations to unsuccessful attempts (see Jones & Olken, 2009). 2 Fourth, we contribute to the literature on the effects of negative campaigning by pointing to one possible way of reconciling existing contradictory evidence (Galasso et al, 2020). Our findings suggest that the effect of negative campaigning on party support is moderated by the political context in which it takes place.…”

Hardwired to attack. Candidates’ personality traits and negative campaigning in three European countries

“…As compared to Germany, Switzerland and Finland have more fragmented party systems and highly competitive electoral systems at both the interparty and intra-party levels, providing candidates with incentives to run against fellow partisans and to organize personalized campaigns in order to cultivate a personal vote (e.g., von Schoultz 2018;Selb & Lutz 2015). While these institutional features should lower the level of campaign negativity in Switzerland and Finland-on the one hand, the benefits of negative campaigns are more uncertain (and limited) when more candidates are competing for a seat (e.g., Walter 2014;Galasso et al 2020), on the other hand negative campaigning against fellow partisans could hurt the party's overall vote share (Karvonen, 2010)-we do not expect such institutional aspects to alter the effects of personality traits on negative campaigning. Thus, the comparative perspective should mainly help us gain greater confidence in the robustness and generalizability of the theorized mechanisms.…”

Parties’ parliamentary attack behaviour throughout the electoral cycle

“…Negative campaigning can have unintended electoral consequences for the attacking party, such as alienating (part of) their voter base and electorally benefitting other (third) parties, respectively referred to as backlash and second-preference boost effects (e.g. Walter and Van der Eijk, 2019;Galasso et al, 2020). In addition, negative campaigning can deteriorate the relationship between the attacking and the targeted party.…”