Divided Politics and Negative Campaign in European Democracies

Negative campaigning has long been considered as one special type of political campaign where parties or candidates advertise issues or characteristics that make their opponents to be seen in a negative light. Furthermore, it has also been viewed as a viable strategy to invite media attention as well as providing voters with information about the competing parties. Nevertheless, most of the studies that explain the extent of negative advertising focus on one single case, which leaves several country-level explanatory factors out of the range of study. In the proposed paper, we aim at making a connection between the ideological polarization of the electorate and the application of negative campaign messages. Combining campaign data with country-level data we seek answer to the question whether ideologically more polarized electoral contexts invite parties to an extensive application of negative campaign messages. Campaign data came from a media content analysis of newspaper articles from one month before 19 national elections in 9 European countries. We expect that more polarized politics involves an extended application of negative campaign techniques. The results show that these two political phenomena are indeed related, but the relationship between them is more complex than we hypothesized. Polarization itself has a negligible effect on the negativity of campaigns, but it enhances the effect of other country-level characteristics considerably.