Negativity in Day-to-Day Politics. Examining Politicians Who Play the Attack Game

Most studies that investigate political negativity or incivility analyze a certain political output or action, such as campaign messages or parliamentary questions. The cognitive considerations politicians make, which inevitably precede the recorded public action, are mostly not captured. In this study we put the decisions that political actors make center stage and examine negativity from an information processing perspective. We directly ask politicians to what extent they look for information that can be used to generate negative attention for their political rivals and we try to explain differences between politicians. The data consist of surveys with Belgian, Israeli and Canadian members of parliament (MPs) conducted in 2013, with a response rate of 45%. The results show that the extent to which politicians in these countries in general select information based on negativity is relatively low. MPs on average say that generating negative attention for opponents matters for only 3.6 points on a scale from 0-10. However, we find great variance among MPs. Regression analyses indicate that the differences are partly explained by Twitter use. The more an MP uses Twitter, the more he or she uses negativity in day-to-day politics. Because we have cross sectional data, we unfortunately cannot tease out the order of causality. Furthermore, compared to their specialist colleagues, generalist MPs are more eager to confront political rivals with incompetence and mistakes, and members of the opposition more so than MPs of government parties. Finally, politicians who are not so interested in representing the views of citizens—but rather want to represent their party platform—are also more keen on generating negative attention for opponents.