Negative Campaigning and Voting Behaviour in Turkey: Establishing Causality Through a Web-Experiment

Regardless of the numerous studies on negative campaigning, this field focuses mainly on the U.S. The research question of this paper is: Does the campaign tone have an effect on political behaviour in the Turkish context? By using a web experiment with 1300 participants- this study tries to provide evidence on the casual link between negative campaigning and voting behaviour in Turkey. This study will not only assess whether negative campaigning affects vote choice, but also whether the influence of the negative ads varies across voters of different parties and whether the campaign tone creates apathy amongst voters. This study contributes to the current literature in at least two ways. First and foremost, it aims to shed more light on the casual link between negative campaigning and voting behaviour. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it employs negative campaigning as an independent variable of the vote function in the Turkish setting.