Attack politics from Albania to Zimbabwe: A large-scale comparative study on the drivers of negative campaigning

Valli, Chiara; Nai, Alessandro (2020). Attack politics from Albania to Zimbabwe: A large-scale comparative study on the drivers of negative campaigning. International Political Science Review, 43(5), pp. 680-696. Sage 10.1177/0192512120946410

Preview

Text 0192512120946410.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial (CC-BY-NC). Download (368kB) | Preview

There is little comparative research on what causes candidates in elections across the world to ‘go negative’ on their rivals – mainly because of the scarcity of large-scale datasets. In this article, we present new evidence covering over 80 recent national elections across the world (2016–2018), in which more than 400 candidates competed. For the first time in a large-scale comparative setting, we show that, ceteris paribus, negativity is more likely for challengers, extreme candidates, and right-wing candidates. Women are not more (or less) likely to go negative on their rivals than their male counterparts, but we find that higher numbers of female MPs in the country reduces negativity overall. Furthermore, women tend to go less negative in proportional systems and more negative in majoritarian systems. Finally, negativity is especially low for candidates on the left in countries with high female representation, and higher for candidates on the right in countries with proportional representation (PR).

Interest & Impact

Downloads

163 since deposited on 03 Nov 2020
40 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item