Mapping the drivers of negative campaigning: Insights from a candidate survey
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0192512121994512 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Research Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512121994512
International Political Science Review
2023, Vol. 44(2) 195 –211
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512121994512
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Mapping the drivers of negative
campaigning: Insights from
a candidate survey
Jürgen Maier
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Alessandro Nai
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
Which candidates are more likely to go negative, and under which conditions? We analyze self-reported
survey data from candidates having run in the 2017 German federal election for the main parties. More
specifically, we test a comprehensive set of factors supposed to drive the use of (a) negative campaigning in
general, (b) policy attacks, and (c) character attacks. Our results show that for all three versions of negative
campaigning the political profile of candidates is most important, followed by personality traits, perceived
campaign dynamics, social profile, and available campaign resources. Within these categories, five factors are
important across the board: members of the governing parties are less likely to attack, ‘extreme ideology’
of the candidate fuels the use of attack politics, candidates who believe that the media can persuade voters
attack more often, disagreeable candidates tend to go negative, and male candidates are more likely to attack
than females.
Keywords
Negative campaigning, policy attacks, character attacks, candidate behavior, candidate survey, Germany,
micro-level factors, context factors
Introduction
In election campaigns, parties and candidates seek to persuade citizens to vote for them instead of
voting for their political opponents. In order to convince voters, however, it is not only the content
of the political offer that counts—that is, policy proposals, legislative records, and programmatic
agendas— but also how that content is packaged. Research has paid great attention to the ‘negative
packaging’ of content—that is, negative campaigning. The reasons for this are at least twofold.
Corresponding author:
Jürgen Maier, Department of Political Science, University of Koblenz-Landau, Kaufhausgasse 9, Landau in der Pfalz
76829, Germany.
Email: maierj@uni-landau.de
994512IPS0010.1177/0192512121994512International Political Science ReviewMaier and Nai
research-article2021
Original Research Article
196 International Political Science Review 44(2)
First, some scholars claim that negative campaigning has been increasing over time. This is par-
ticularly true for the United States (Fowler et al., 2016: 53; Geer, 2012); however, the situation for
Europe is less clear-cut (Walter, 2014). Second, negative campaigning can potentially have ‘cor-
rosive’ effects on democracy—for example, demobilizing voters and increasing political cynicism
(Ansolabehere and Iyengar, 1995; Cappella and Jamieson, 1997). Due to the significance of nega-
tive campaigning, it is not only important to understand the impact of attacks, but also who uses
them and when.
The existing literature on the drivers of negative campaigning faces, in our opinion, four main
limitations. First, most of the available research tends to focus on a limited set of factors while
ignoring other potential drivers of negativity, and analyses considering the full set of micro-level
drivers—such as aspects of a candidate’s social profile, their political profile, and personality
traits—are rare (but see Nai et al., 2019). From a theoretical standpoint, this can potentially lead to
underdeveloped accounts of what drives candidates to go negative; models might be underspeci-
fied and therefore might not provide a robust assessment of the dependent variable in focus. To be
sure, we are not claiming that existing studies voluntarily ignored important determinants; we are
well aware of the difficulty of measuring characteristics of competing candidates, such as their
personality profile. In contrast to most existing studies, we provide in this article what we believe
is the most comprehensive assessment of how the candidates’ profile (and the environment they are
embedded in) affect their use of negativity during an election campaign.
Second, most existing research usually analyzes the use of negative campaigning in general.
However, attacks can have different foci (see Benoit, 2007: 44; Hopmann et al., 2018): On the one
hand, criticism of the political opponent can deal with issues and policy positions. On the other hand,
attacks can focus on the opponents’ character and persona. To the best of our knowledge, this distinc-
tion has rarely been of any relevance yet for the analysis of the drivers of negative campaigning.
Third, and from a methodological standpoint, most of existing research on the drivers of nega-
tive campaigning is based on content analyses of campaign material, such as ads (Fowler et al.,
2016), speeches (Benoit, 2007), televised debates (Maier and Jansen, 2017), or press releases
(Dolezal et al., 2017). However, this methodological approach comes with some limitations. First,
candidates’ attitudes, personalities, and perceptions of the race cannot be as easily captured.
Second, some scholars argue that scientists’ definitions of what should be considered as negative
campaign communication does not necessarily match the understanding of other actors in the
political game (e.g. Lipsitz and Geer, 2017). A more recent strand of research has used judgments
from external observers—for example, voters (Donovan et al., 2016) or expert ratings from jour-
nalists (Patterson and Shea, 2004), political consultants (Swint, 1998), election agents (Walter
and van der Eijk, 2019), and scholars (Nai, 2018a)—to measure the presence of attacks. Although
this approach has important strengths—for example, allowing large-scale comparative research—
it also has its downsides; for example, the extent to which expert ratings reflect ‘true’ values needs
careful consideration.
Fourth, most studies in this field focus on the United States, and very little is still known about
the drivers of negative campaigning in other countries (for non-US or comparative research see, for
example, Elmelund-Praestekaer, 2010; Maier and Jansen, 2017; Nai 2018a; Walter et al., 2014).
Unfortunately, trends found for the US case cannot simply be automatically transposed to other
contexts, as the situation with respect to politics, society, and the media is, of course, usually very
different.
Our article stems directly from the existence of these four limitations. Unlike all other studies
we know of, we rely on information collected directly from those who are responsible for ‘going
negative’: the candidates themselves. Hence, we are expanding the available data sources for the
study of the use of negative campaigning. Although running interviews with candidates to get
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