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Beyond American negativity: toward a general understanding of the determinants of negative campaigning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Christian Elmelund-Præstekær
Christian Elmelund-Præstekær*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark
*
* E-mail: cel@sam.sdu.dk
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Abstract

This article supplements and further develops the almost exclusively American literature on the determinants of negative campaigning by analyzing the tone of the Danish parties’ election campaigns. It concludes that proximity to governmental power matters, as oppositional parties are more negative than incumbents. This is comparable to the American experiences. The prospect of electoral failure, however, does not affect the tone the same way as poor poll standings do in the US. Moreover, it is suggested that future studies of negativity might consider how different party organizations affect the campaign tone; at least this study finds indications that parties with large proportions of party identifiers are slightly more negative than other parties. Finally, it is found that parties campaign differently in different channels of communication; that is, they are generally more negative in channels that allow direct interaction among politicians. This finding poses the question whether some channels are better empirical sources for studies of negativity than others, which is addressed in the closing section of the article.

Keywords

negative campaigningmultiparty systempartiesgeneral electioncontent analysis
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 137 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © European Consortium for Political Research 2010

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