Pundits and politicians throughout the western world argue that political communication has become increasingly negative during the latest decades. Empirical investigation of such claims remains scarce, however, and entirely absent outside the American context. The present article gain new ground by gauging the level of negativity over four decades in a multiparty system and by evaluating the effect of time as well as a range of contextual factors on the level of negativity. Since the 1970s politics has been mediatized in Europe and parties have internalized the media logic, including the awareness of journalistic news values such as conflict. We argue that this process leads to increasing negativity. We also discuss contextual factors unrelated to time and thus suggest that the reason of an election as well as the number of running parties, incumbent parties, and new parties might affect the overall level of negativity. While we find no unidirectional temporal trend, some of the contextual factors prove helpful to understand longitudinal variation. The empirical case is Danish national elections in the 1970s, 1990s and 2000s. This country and time period is suitable because the process of mediatization is evident here and because the variation on the contextual variables is provided. In this regard we consider our case typical for most European multiparty systems rendering the findings illustrative in the wider European context.
