Positive Effects Of Negative Campaigning On Senate Elections

Negative campaigning and its effect on political participation is a topic that has been widely studied during the last decades in the US, mainly due to the fact that some scholars defend that this electoral strategy threatens American democracy as it reduces voter turnout (Brooks. 2006). This is the case of Ansolabehere et al. (1994), which conducted both an experiment and also an aggregate-level analysis during the senate elections of 1992. The results of the experiment demonstrated that the participants that were shown negative adverts of real candidates (so adverts attacking another candidate) were 5% less likely to participate in a hypothetical election process, than those that were presented positive adverts. In the same line, their aggregate-level analysis proved that in the 1992 senate elections, turnout was lower in …show more content…
On the one hand, as mentioned in Brooks (2006), studies show that people dislike negative campaigning, as voters prefer candidates to talk about their ideas and what they are intending to do, instead of criticising other candidates. Additionally, negative campaigning may induce negativity towards the main candidates affecting negatively voter’s political trust and so discouraging turnout. Conversely, negative advertisement increases voter’s political knowledge resulting in a higher participation (the positive relation between voter’s political knowledge and turnout can be seen is studies such as Larcinese, (2007)). Negative information increase voter’s political knowledge because of the fact that people tend to remember negative information more (negativity bias) and also because negative advertisement usually contains more information than positive advertisement (Geer, 2006). In addition, with this type of electoral strategy, the differences between candidates are underlined attracting undecided voter to the