The Impact of Civility on Campaign Tone Perceptions

What drives citizens to a view a political campaign as negative? Which matters more: what is said or the way in which it is said? In this research, we examine the relative impacts of a civil tone and attacks on a candidate’s competence, integrity and ideology on people’s perceptions of a campaign’s negativity. Using an experiment embedded in a survey of a random sample of Americans, we find that a civil tone is the most important driver of campaign negativity. The impact of civility, however, is conditioned on the viewer’s sex, level of education, ideology and age.