Undermining a Rival Party’s Issue Competence through Negative Campaigning: Experimental Evidence from the USA, Denmark, and Australia

AuthorHenrik Bech Seeberg,Alessandro Nai
DOI10.1177/0032321720916162
Published date01 August 2021
Date01 August 2021
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720916162
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(3) 623 –643
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720916162
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Undermining a Rival Party’s
Issue Competence through
Negative Campaigning:
Experimental Evidence
from the USA, Denmark,
and Australia
Henrik Bech Seeberg1
and Alessandro Nai2
Abstract
Much party communication encourages voters to lower issue-related evaluations of rival parties.
Yet, studies of such influence are rare. Drawing on research on political parties’ negative campaigning,
this article starts to fill this gap. We triangulate evidence from four survey experiments across six
issues in Denmark, the US, and Australia, and show that a party’s negative campaigning decreases
voters’ evaluations of the target party’s issue-handling competence (i.e. issue ownership), but
does not backlash on voters’ evaluations of the sponsor. Such attack on the target party does
not have to be tied to a negative policy development like the crime rate to undermine the target
party’s competence evaluations. At the same time, a negative policy development only undermines
a party’s evaluations when it is accompanied by a rival party’s negative campaigning attack. The
implications for party competition and the mass-elite linkage are important.
Keywords
issue ownership, political parties, negative campaigning, mass-elite linkage
Accepted: 9 March 2020
A cornerstone of representative democracy is that voters form opinions about candidates
and parties in order to elect representatives to parliament. This is a demanding task, and
research increasingly focuses on how party communication assists voters in forming
1Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
2Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam,
Netherlands
Corresponding author:
Henrik Bech Seeberg, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark.
Email: h.seeberg@ps.au.dk
916162PSX0010.1177/0032321720916162Political StudiesSeeberg and Nai
research-article2020
Article
624 Political Studies 69(3)
opinions (Pardos-Prado and Sagarzazu, 2016; Seeberg, 2018; Slothuus and de Vreese,
2010). Although much party communication aims to undermine a rival party’s reputation
in the public (Lau and Pomper, 2004; Nai and Walter, 2015), research rarely focuses on
this central aspect of party competition. This is also true for the accelerating body of
research on voters’ evaluations of political parties’ issue-handling competence, so-called
issue ownership (Egan, 2013; Jennings and Green, 2017; Seeberg, 2017), which mostly
studies how a party can beef up its own issue ownership (see, e.g. Dahlberg and
Martinsson, 2015; Stubager and Seeberg, 2016; Walgrave et al., 2009) rather than study
the effects of rival party attacks. Yet, adopting the lens of negative campaigning research
to study the phenomena of issue ownership attack is likely to be particularly relevant.
Negative campaigning is perhaps one of the most distinctive features of contemporary
election campaigns (Lau and Pomper, 2004; Nai and Walter, 2015), and issue ownership
attacks can be detrimental to a party’s electoral success. The literature provides several
case studies—for example, Bill Clinton in the US (Holian, 2004), Tony Blair in the UK
(Norris, 1997), and Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Denmark (Blomqvist and Green-Pedersen,
2004)—showing how competing actors attacked their way into office by using negative
campaigning toward their rivals’ issue reputations.
To take a first step to more systematically understand if a party can undermine a rival
party’s issue ownership, this article analyses to what extent a party’s negative cam-
paigning toward a rival party undermines the rival’s reputation in the public for issue-
handling capacity without backlash effects on the sponsor party. Such attacks often
come in connection to a negative policy development such as increasing crime in which
the party aims to make voters blame the rival party for the problem and its poor perfor-
mance (Seeberg, 2018; Thesen, 2013). Hence, in order to deepen the understanding of
the effects of negative campaigning on a rival party’s issue ownership, the article inno-
vates analytically by keeping problems and negative campaigning apart in order to
investigate how they go together. Whereas the negative policy development makes a
party’s negative message more relevant and therefore should increase the influence of
the message on the rival’s issue ownership, we also expect that negative campaigning
makes a negative policy development more relevant for voters’ competence evaluations
of the rival party.
In this way, the article makes three contributions: (1) It studies how a party can under-
mine voters’ evaluations of a rival party’s competence; (2) it brings together two prominent
research agendas on negative campaigning and issue ownership to understand the effects
of party communication on voter evaluations; (3) it advances an increasing scholarly inter-
est in disentangling the influence of party communication and the policy development on
voter evaluations (Pardos-Prado and Sagarzazu, 2016; Seeberg, 2018). To make these con-
tributions, we extend on the increasing number of non-US studies of negative campaigning
(Dolezal et al., 2016; Elmelund-Præstekær, 2010; Hansen and Pedersen, 2008; Pattie et al.,
2011; Ridout and Walter, 2015; Walter et al., 2014) and triangulate evidence from four
original survey experiments on the issues of health care, immigration, the economy, unem-
ployment benefits, agriculture, and rural development in the diverse settings of Denmark,
Australia, and the US.
Taking on this task has important implications for our account of the mass-elite link-
age. If a party can alter the connection between a rival party and voters—as expressed in
the issue ownership (Petrocik, 1996)—the mass-elite linkage appears more fluid than
often portrayed in the sense that voters can be persuaded to party defection. Moreover,
against the idea of representative democracy, the mass-elite linkage comes out as quite

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