Attack politics from Albania to Zimbabwe: A large-scale comparative study on the drivers of negative campaigning
| Author | Chiara Valli,Alessandro Nai |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120946410 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120946410
International Political Science Review
2022, Vol. 43(5) 680 –696
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512120946410
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Attack politics from Albania
to Zimbabwe: A large-scale
comparative study on the drivers
of negative campaigning
Chiara Valli
University of Bern, Switzerland
Alessandro Nai
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Abstract
There is little comparative research on what causes candidates in elections across the world to ‘go negative’
on their rivals – mainly because of the scarcity of large-scale datasets. In this article, we present new
evidence covering over 80 recent national elections across the world (2016–2018), in which more than 400
candidates competed. For the first time in a large-scale comparative setting, we show that, ceteris paribus,
negativity is more likely for challengers, extreme candidates, and right-wing candidates. Women are not
more (or less) likely to go negative on their rivals than their male counterparts, but we find that higher
numbers of female MPs in the country reduces negativity overall. Furthermore, women tend to go less
negative in proportional systems and more negative in majoritarian systems. Finally, negativity is especially
low for candidates on the left in countries with high female representation, and higher for candidates on the
right in countries with proportional representation (PR).
Keywords
Negative campaigning, comparative political communication, expert survey, elite behaviour
Introduction
This article investigates the drivers of negative campaigning worldwide using a dataset of more than
80 national elections. The phenomenon of negative campaigning – that is, the use of political attacks
against the program, record, policies, or persona of opponents during election campaigns – has
Corresponding author:
Alessandro Nai, Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, Postbus 15793,
Amsterdam, 1001 NG, The Netherlands.
Email: a.nai@uva.nl
946410IPS0010.1177/0192512120946410International Political Science ReviewValli and Nai
research-article2020
Article
Valli and Nai 681
received increased attention in recent decades. Yet, the question of whether negativity is a detrimen-
tal force for contemporary democracy is highly contested. Several studies have shown that negative
messages tend to demobilize voters, negatively influence public trust (Ansolabehere and Iyengar,
1995), and increase political cynicism (Cappella and Jamieson, 1997). At the same time, other
scholars suggest instead that negative campaigning has the potential to mobilize voters (Goldstein
and Freedman, 2002) because it stimulates interest and participation (Geer, 2006).
Regardless of its effects, few would argue that negative campaigning is inconsequential, which
is why the literature increasingly focuses also on its drivers. Why, and under what conditions, are
parties and candidates more likely to go negative on their opponents? Negative campaigning is
unlikely to always work as intended, and often ends up harming the sponsors more than their des-
ignated target (Roese and Sande, 1993). Also, because of this, the decision to make use of attack
messages often becomes a strategic one. Little is, however, known about how the individual pro-
files of candidates affect this decision, especially in a comparative perspective. Most of the research
on negativity in politics focuses on the American case. Outside this case, existing evidence is either
on specific countries – such as Brazil (da Silveira and de Mello, 2011) or Germany (Maier and
Jansen, 2015) – or, if comparative, often limited to only a handful of countries (e.g. Walter et al.,
2014). A recent study (Nai, 2018) compared the use of negative campaigning by candidates who
competed in 35 national elections worldwide, but mostly focused on differences among the spon-
sors and the targets of the attacks, and only addressed the issue of cross-country comparison
marginally.
All things considered, we still know surprisingly little about (i) whether negative campaigning
in elections across the world – from Albania to Zimbabwe, so to speak – follows the same logics
identified in the US literature, and (ii) to what extent differences across countries drive the use of
negativity in campaigns differently. Is negative campaigning a global phenomenon, driven by uni-
versal ‘rules’? To what extent do the characteristics of the context shape the use of negative cam-
paigning strategies?
This article contributes to the emerging comparative political communication literature by look-
ing at the use of negativity in elections worldwide. We do so by comparing the content of election
campaigns of 404 ‘top’ candidates (that is, party leaders and leading candidates for office) who
competed in 84 elections in 71 countries worldwide between June 2016 and December 2018, rated
by selected samples of scholars (1,321 experts in total). We aim to shed light on the effects of can-
didate profiles and two specific contextual aspects, namely the electoral system and the proportion
of female representatives in parliament. As will be discussed in the following sections, we claim
that the increased need for consensus in proportional electoral systems reduces the incentives to go
negative and that more female representatives lead to a convergence towards ‘kinder’ communica-
tive norms and hence, less negativity.
All data and materials, including the full Appendix, are available for replication at the following
Open Science Foundation (OSF) repository: https://osf.io/4vhea/
Why and under which conditions candidates go negative
Candidate profile. The literature claims that incumbents are less likely to go negative than challeng-
ers (Nai, 2018; Walter and Vliegenthart, 2010). Incumbents have a larger political record which
they can use to promote themselves; because challengers are less likely to have this option, they
need to provide good reasons as to why voters should turn against the incumbents (Kahn and Ken-
ney, 2004). Challengers tend to receive weaker media coverage (Hopmann et al., 2011), which
encourages them to find ways to increase their visibility, by, for example, attracting attention
through negative rhetoric (Nai, 2018). Moreover, challengers have no office to lose, which makes
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