Violence Against Politicians, Negative Campaigning, and Public Opinion: Evidence From Poland

• Author: Krzysztof Krakowski,Juan S. Morales,Dani Sandu
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211066211
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(12) 2086–2118

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211066211

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Violence Against

Politicians, Negative

Campaigning, and Public

Opinion: Evidence From

Poland

Krzysztof Krakowski

1

, Juan S. Morales

2

and

Dani Sandu

3

Abstract

It is commonly viewedthat violence against politicians increases support for the

victim’s party. We revisit this conjecture drawing on evidence from an as-

sassination of an opposition politician in Poland. First, we analyze engagement

with Twitter content posted by opposition and government politicians using a

difference-in-differences framework. Second, we use a public opinion survey

collected in the days around the attack and compare party preferences of

respondentsinterviewed just before and respondents interviewedjust after the

attack. Our resultsreveal decreased support forthe victim’s (opposition) party

relative to support for the government. To explain this f‌inding, we show that

the oppositionantagonized the publicby engaging in negative campaigningagainst

the government over theirpolitician’s assassination. Content analysis of tweets

and news media conf‌irms that citizens punished the opposition for their

negative campaigning after the violence. Tentative evidence suggests that these

effects could have had long-run political consequences.

Keywords

violence, public opinion, negative campaigning, Poland

1

Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Turin, Torino, Italy

2

Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada

3

European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy

Corresponding Author:

Krzysztof Krakowski, Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Turin, Torino, Italy.

Email: krzysztof.krakowski@carloalberto.org

Introduction

Violence against politicians poses a serious threat to political order, even in the

most advanced liberal democracies. Appleton (2000) lists over 200 assas-

sination attempts against heads of government in the 20th century. Between

1950 and 2004, in two out of three years a national leader was assassinated

(Jones & Olken, 2009). Since 2016, high-level politicians from three EU-

member states have been victims of political violence: in 2016, a UK Labour

Party deputy, Jo Cox was shot to death few days before the Brexit vote; in

January 2019, PawełAdamowicz, the Mayor of Gda ´

nsk in Poland was

stabbed during a charity event; and in June 2019, Walter Lübcke, a regional

leader of the ruling German party was killed in front of his house. A recent

study shows that a surprising 13% of American mayors acknowledge having

been the victims of physical violence (Thomas et al., 2019). The frequency of

these incidents raises questions about the impact of violence against politi-

cians on public opinion.

At f‌irst glance, politicians’assassinations lead to an increase in support for

the targeted party. The assassinations of heads of states and governments have

been shown to reinforce incumbent support (Raviv et al., 1998;Appleton,

2000). These changes are usually explained by a higher government en-

dorsement in situations of threat and uncertainty (rally effect; Baker & Oneal,

2001), and a greater affect for victims of violence (empathy effect; Dinas et al.,

2016). In the case of incumbent assassinations, both mechanisms work in the

government’s favor. However, when a nonincumbent politician is assassi-

nated, the two mechanisms work in opposite directions, leading to ambivalent

predictions regarding net changes in support.

Does approval for the victim’s party also increase in the case of nonin-

cumbent assassinations? We study this question drawing on evidence from a

lethal and tragic attack on the opposition mayor of Gda ´

nsk, Poland—Paweł

Adamowicz—who was assassinated in January 2019 during a public charity

event. The killer explicitly mentioned Adamowicz’s party aff‌iliation as a

reason for his assassination. We track changes in public opinion related to that

event in two ways. First, we analyze engagement with Twitter content posted

by opposition and government politicians using a difference-in-differences

framework. Second, we use a public opinion survey collected in the days

around the attack, in an Unexpected Event during Surveys Design (UESD)

framework, which compares respondents interviewed just before and those

interviewed just after the attack (see Muñoz et al., 2020).

Contrary to the common view in the literature, we f‌ind that the assassi-

nation of the Polish mayor decreased relative support for his opposition party.

Estimates are sizable: within a 15-day time window around the date of the

violent attack, government politicians received 35% higher Twitter engage-

ment compared to opposition politicians. In the survey data, within the 4-day

Krakowski et al. 2087

time window covered, we f‌ind that the government had a relative increase in

support of around 41%. We conf‌irm these f‌indings through a series of per-

mutation and falsif‌ication tests, including time and unit f‌ixed-effects models,

matching techniques, and placebo outcomes.

Why did the opposition lose support after the assassination of their own

politician? The stabbing of PawełAdamowicz marked an unprecedented

escalation of political conf‌lict in Poland. While citizens expected leaders to

attempt to de-escalate conf‌lict following the event, the opposition responded

through aggressive language and verbal attacks on the government (see Sarna

& Tyc, 2020). Consistent with this anecdotal evidence, we show that the loss

of support for the opposition is linked to its confrontational response to the

mayor’s assassination in the form of negative campaigning against the

government. We f‌ind that the opposition’s use of negative campaigning after

the violence on Twitter explains about 60% of their loss of relative support.

This pattern is also present in the survey data. The opposition’s loss of support

is most pronounced among survey respondents who watched partisan TV

channels and were thus most exposed to the party’s negative campaigning.

Among neutral TV viewers, by contrast, the support for the opposition is even

slightly increased. Content analysis of 3221 news scraped from the main

Polish TV channels conf‌irms that these neutral outlets were the least likely to

broadcast the opposition’s negative campaigning after the violence.

The relevance of the case study and the proposed mechanism are further

highlighted by tentative evidence on long-run patterns of political support. We

show that the 2019 electoral votes of opposition politicians and their negative

campaigning after the assassination are negatively correlated, suggesting that

shocks to party support following political assassinations could have long-run

political consequences. Importantly, these consequences are likely to depend

on how politicians respond to such tragic events.

Our study contributes to the literature in four important ways. First, we

provide evidence on the consequences of political assassinations in the case of

an attack on a nonincumbent politician. It is a common, yet understudied type

of violence against politicians, which may result in different changes in public

opinion than well-documented incumbent assassinations.

1

Second, we pro-

vide evidence on heterogeneous responses to political assassinations de-

pending on politicians’reactions to these events (see Davenport et al., 2019).

We document the moderating role of negative campaigning. Third, the case

study and the new data we collect allows for both causal identif‌ication and a

careful exploration of the proposed mechanism. Our approach, leveraging

short-run variation and high-frequency data, thus overcomes limitations of

previous studies that either rely on correlational evidence (e.g., Iqbal & Zorn,

2008), or estimate the effect of assassinations by comparing successful as-

sassinations to unsuccessful attempts (see Jones & Olken, 2009).

2

Fourth, we

contribute to the literature on the effects of negative campaigning by pointing

2088 Comparative Political Studies 55(12)