Negative Campaigning and its Effects on Political Engagement

One of the main critics about the recent development of political communication is that informative, policy-focused campaigns are being replaced by negative, enemy-seeking ones. Critics and worries about the lack of ’substance’ of political debate are becoming one of the main focus of evaluation of the political process of democracies, although these worries have always been existing about modern political campaigns and their media representation. The crucial question behind these arguments is how this style of political communication affects the citizens and their decisions which define the democratic process. Does the lack of policy substance mean that voters cannot make well-informed decisions? Does a highly negative and uncivil political debate make them stay away from politics? Can this type of political communication have further social consequences? Despite these critics the effect of negative campaigning is not as evident as general critics consider as both the negative effects (demobilization, dealignment, ill-informed electorate) and the effectiveness (i.e. rising political engagement towards the campaigning party or candidate) are constantly debated. Research on the topic often shows contradictory results, some of them providing cases of demobilization effect, lower levels of partisanship and higher level of passive, indecisive and uninformed citizens, or counterproductive effects on the party using negativity, while other results showing mobilization effect, and a rising level of political engagement of voters. Inconsistent results imply that negativity generally does not have the same effect in every communication situation and electoral context. Experimental results strengthen this implication as they show that different types of negative information and different targets of attack trigger different reactions of the subjects. Taking into consideration these differences the paper examines whether negative campaigning has an effect on political engagement (party-choice and participation) of voters, using data on 19 campaigns and elections.