My Enemy's Enemy is My Friend: the Implications of Negative Partisanship in Multi-Party Systems

Strong negative feelings towards political parties and their supporters seem to be on the rise and have been shown to have important implications for behaviour in- and outside of politics. While most of the current literature on negative partisanship was developed in two-party systems like the US, I explore in this paper what consequences strongly disliking a political party has in multi-party systems. I argue that negative partisanship changes how voters evaluate all parties on offer, not just the one that they really dislike. Along the idea of “my enemy's enemy is my friend”, I argue that really disliking a party can also move voters closer to another party. I test these ideas using a survey experiment conducted in Canada. I find that priming voters about negative partisanship has the expected effect on party evaluations but does not affect political participation. This paper makes an important contribution to our understanding of negative partisanship, showing that negative partisanship has empirical implications that are distinct from positive partisanship, and that this concept merits further engagement and attention, also and especially in multi-party systems.