The Rise of Negative Personalization

Comparative analyses have unfolded long-term trends towards growing distrust of political actors in advanced post-industrial democracies. Early literature repeatedly referred to the operation of potential negativity biases in voters’ choice – voters cast a ballot “against” candidates rather than “for” candidates. However, this claim has only very rarely been put to empirical test. Evidence in support for an increasing impact of negative personality evaluations on voters’ choice is rather thin, and virtually unavailable for multi-party democracies outside the US. Against this background, this paper aims at providing a comparative, longitudinal assessment of the impact of negativity on vote choice. The paper is framed within the broad literature on the “personalization of politics” and moves from the intuition that an increasingly confrontational style of campaigning and political communication in a context of strong political personalization, could all be leading to the development of a distinctive form of “negative personalization” in voters’ behavior. The research question that the paper will tackle can be formulated as follows: Are voter choices increasing driven by negative attitudes towards candidates and party leaders? To answer these questions, we rely on a novel dataset pooling 110 national election surveys from 14 Western European parliamentary democracies collected in the period 1961-2018.