The Impact of Personality on Viewers’ Reactions to Negative Candidate Statements in Televised Debates

In the field exists strong disagreement on whether attacks are effective or not. Previous research indicates that citizens’ reactions to negative ads depend on their social and political profile. In contrast to the large body of research on negative political advertising almost no research is available on the impact of attacks in televised debates. In addition, only few variables moderating the effects of negative candidate statements have currently been identified. This paper picks up the idea of Fridkin and Kenney (2011) suggesting that personality moderates the impact of negative campaigning. To analyze this hypothesis for televised debates we combine different data sources collected in the context of the 2013 German televised debate; content analysis data of the debate, survey data and real-time response data.