“Liars” and “Frauds” - Negative Advertising in Austrian Elections, 1945-2019

• In Event: Election Campaigns: Advertising, Propaganda, and Media

Abstract

Election posters have been employed as a campaign tool as long as democratic elections have been held. In Austria, they are still one of the most important campaign tools and are employed more extensively in Austria than anywhere else in Europe. For political communication scholars, posters as a long-lasting means of communication provide key information regarding long-term trends in political communication. In this paper, I study negative advertising on election posters in Austria over a time period of 74 years (1945-2019).

While a large part of political ads is used to promote a party’s positive qualities and praise their candidates, negative ads deal with political opponents. The ads may contain criticism of the opponent’s ideology or manifesto as well as personal attacks on the candidates. This paper examines the negative advertising approach that parties choose when they address voters directly through election posters. Which are the factors that determine the degree of negative campaigning on election posters, and how did negative campaigning evolve over time? Based on previous research, I argue that a) the level of negative campaigning on election posters decreases over time, b) that opposition parties and smaller parties resort to negative messages more often, c) that in more polarized party systems, the degree of negative campaigning is higher.

Data for the analysis is obtained from quantitative image content analysis of all 1,153 election posters produced by nine competing parties in 23 campaigns between 1945 and 2019. Multilevel analysis is used to test the effects of the election year, government/opposition status, party size, and the right-left polarization of parliament on the degree of negative advertising. Controlling for additional effects such as poster’s issue or the gender of the candidate, the results from multilevel analysis demonstrate that employment of negative campaigning on election posters has steadily decreased.

The campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s bore a high level of conflict and confrontation, particularly between the Social Democrats and Conservatives. In later years, when a more consensual political culture emerged, negative messages on posters almost disappeared. Parties had obviously chosen to use the valuable public space to promote their own strengths rather than the opponent’s weaknesses; negative messages seem to have moved to the digital sphere. The paper contributes to the literature of political communication by helping to understand the seemingly “new” phenomenon of negative advertising in a historical context.

Author

• Lore Hayek, University of Innsbruck