This paper examines the interesting question when do parties make use of negative campaigning in Western Europe. It contributes to the state of the art on negative campaigning in several ways. First of all, this paper looks specifically at how the election context affects the use of negative campaigning. Existing studies have a strong focus on party characteristics when explaining the decision to go negative. In this paper we theorize how the election context might affect the decision to go negative and test next to the most common context variable the closeness of the election the influence of several other measures of perceived competition. Second, this paper is the first comparative study on negative campaigning examining this offensive electoral strategy in three West European countries thereby contributing to the development of a more general theory on negative campaigning and its use. In addition, this provides a strong test for the primarily in the US developed explanatory factors. This research is based on an extensive dataset measuring the use of negative campaigning by national political parties in 23 parliamentary campaigns in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands between 1980 and 2006.
