Making Friends or Foes? A Comparative Study of Attack Behaviour

The main bulk of studies examining the strategic aspects of negative campaigning is focused on the question of under which circumstances parties resort to attacking their opponent, however the choice of target is an equally important decision. Nevertheless, only several single country studies have explored this aspect of attack behaviour. This is likely the result of the pre-dominant U.S. literature, where the choice of target only comes into play in three candidate races or primary election campaigns. Nevertheless, in the West-European context where multiparty systems are most common in which parties have a large range of possible targets this is a very prominent decision that parties have to make. In this paper we take the first steps to examine the choice of target comparatively by studying attack behavior within 600 party election broadcasts in British, German and Dutch election campaigns during the period from 1981-2012.