When the Going Gets Tough: Individual Populist Attitudes, Negative Campaigns, and Party Evaluation in France and Spain

The two main drivers of party evaluation – individual preferences, on the one hand, and the campaigning efforts of competing parties and candidates, on the other – are well studied. Much less is known, however, about how these two drivers interact to shape voters’ preferences. A growing literature addresses the issue by studying, usually through experiments, to what extent individual differences moderate the reception and treatment of political messages. These studies, however, often have limited external validity and are ill-suited to study a real setting. In this article we innovate by assessing such interaction via combining pre-electoral surveys and data about the content of election campaigns. We do so within the theoretical framework of electoral populism, and look simultaneously at the existence of populist attitudes within the public and at the use of harsher campaigns by competing parties (negative tone, fear appeals, and populist messages). To what extent do these two elements interact to shape voters’ evaluations of candidates and parties? Are populist voters more likely to respond to harsher campaigns? For which type of voters are harsher campaigns more likely to backlash and generate more negative evaluations of the sponsor? We answer these questions by triangulating data from two pre-election surveys conducted in Spain (N=1200) and France (N=800) in 2016 and 2017, and a new dataset about the content of election campaigns by competing candidates in these and other countries (NEGex) as rated by experts in electoral behavior.