Negative Economic Campaigning? A Principal Agent Approach to the Study of Strategic Election Campaign Behaviour

Economic voting is a well-established term in political science – but is there such a thing as economic campaigning? Up to date, there are no systematic theoretical nor empirical analyses of economic context factors influencing campaign styles at elections. This paper will elaborate on two common principal agent models of political representation, a sanctioning and a selection one, and transfer their assumptions to negative campaigning. Empirically, over 2000 campaign posters and 68 TV ads of 280 German state election campaigns from 1998 to 2013 will be subject to a multi-level analysis. This bulk of content analytical data, probably the largest set of paid media-data at least in Germany, allows for an enormous natural variation in election settings and advanced statistical methods. Using MLA, party characteristics on the individual level and contextual election factors on the aggregate level can be separated as incentives for the use of different campaign strategies.