The Effect of Negative Campaigning on Trust and Satisfaction with Democracy

• In Event: Campaigns and Information in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

  Parties spend parts of their campaigns criticizing other parties’ performance and characteristics, such as honesty, integrity, and unity. These attacks aim to negatively affect the target parties’ electoral performance. But what are the side-effects of going-negative more broadly on measures such as political trust and support for democracy. We argue that there are depressing effects. We also expect that partisanship conditions these responses. Copartisans of the attacker would be less negatively affected while copartisans of the target should be more strongly affected. Combining a dataset on campaign rhetoric with survey data from eight European countries, we analyze the above argument. These results have important implications for the electoral campaigns, political trust, and satisfaction with democracy literature.

Authors

• Matthew Edward Bergman, Corvinus University of Budapest

• Daniel Weitzel, Colorado State University