Negative Campaigning and Vote Choice in Europe: How Do Different Partisan Groups React to Campaign Attacks?

• Author: Zeynep Somer-Topcu,Daniel Weitzel
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221074283
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(13) 2283–2310

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221074283

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Negative Campaigning

and Vote Choice in

Europe: How Do

Different Partisan

Groups React to

Campaign Attacks?

Zeynep Somer-Topcu

1

and Daniel Weitzel

2



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 do they work?

While attacks are informative, we argue that how voters react to negative

campaigning depends on their partisanship. While the target’s copartisans are

more likely to get mobilized in favor of their party, the attacker’s copartisans

are expected to punish the target due to their respective partisan motivations.

We expect null effects for attacks for partisans of third parties as well as

nonpartisans. Combining a new dataset on campaign rhetoric with survey data

from eight European countries, we show support for most but not all of our

expectations. These results have important implications for the electoral

campaigns literature.

Keywords

partisanship, party rhetoric, negative campaigning, vote choice

1

University of Texas at Austin, USA

2

University of Vienna, Wien, Austria

Corresponding Author:

Zeynep Somer-Topcu, Department of Government, University of Texas, 158 W 21st ST STOP

A1800, Austin, TX 78712, USA.

Email: zsomer@utexas.edu

Introduction

Leading up to the 2015 election in the United Kingdom, David Cameron, the

Conservative Party leader, and the party’s old guard were hard at work

warning voters about a potential Labour government. The Telegraph reported

the following on its front page on May 6, the day before the election:

The British people must come together and unite against the nightmare prospect

of a Labour-SNP government which will “tear our nation apart,”Sir John Major

[Conservative Party] says today …Meanwhile, David Cameron, the Prime

Minister, described Mr. Miliband [the leader of the Labour Party] as a “very

dangerous person”who is using a “con trick”to get into Downing Street

(Dominiczak, 2015).

With these statements, the Conservatives attacked Labour for a potential

divisive performance if the latter party was elected (“will tear our nation

apart”) and criticized the character of the Labour leader (“very dangerous,”

“using a con trick”). In this paper, we examine how negative campaign

rhetoric like this affects the electoral performance of the target party (the

Labour Party in the example above). We follow Geer (2006) and def‌ine

negative campaigning as any negative reference toward rivals by highlighting

their failings, misdoings, and negative character traits. These discussions can

be about the leader or the party without any specif‌ic reference to any policy

(“the party is incompetent”) or may be related to a specif‌ic policy (“the party is

dishonest in its tax policy”).

The evidence in the literature for the electoral consequences of campaign

attacks is either mixed (especially in the case of the United States, see Lau &

Rovner, 2009 for a summary) or, in the comparative case, mostly missing (but

see, Haddock & Zanna, 1997;Jung & Tavits, 2021;Pattie et al., 2011;Roy &

Alcantara, 2016). We argue that two theories direct us to two competing ex-

pectations for how negative campaigning works for or against the target party.

On the one hand, according to the information theory, by highlighting rivals’

weaknesses and negativecharacteristics, negative campaigning educates voters

about their opponents’f‌laws and shouldwork against the target party.Yet, these

attacks may also backf‌ire and improve the target party’s electoral performance

by motivating votersto rally behind it (see Banda & Windett,2016 for a similar

argument in the United States). In particular, voters who reject the negative

messages and f‌ind these opportunistic or in bad taste may sympathize with the

target party and turn out in favor of it in greater numbers.

Do all voters respond to negative campaigning similarly? According to the

partisan-motivated reasoning theory (see, e.g., Taber & Lodge, 2006), in-

dividuals seek information consistent with their partisan beliefs and ignore

inconsistent information. Hence, we expect different partisan groups to react

2284 Comparative Political Studies 55(13)