Negative campaigns, negative votes? How perceptions of political campaigns impact citizens’ meanings of voting.

Negativity in political campaigns has been an important concern for both scholars and commentators, and this research has led to a plethora of knowledge. Several studies have found that, while negative campaigns may harm a candidate’s opponent, they may also cause a backlash effect where some citizens seem to abandon their preferred candidate because of their candidate’s use of negative campaign strategies. In either of those situations, it seems that negative campaigning causes citizens to base their vote choice on who not to choose, rather than a positive criterion. In other words, prior research implies – but does not test – that negative campaigning leads to a negative meaning of voting: voting based on keeping candidates or parties out of office, rather than voting them into office. Therefore, (perceptions of) negative campaigns could be correlated with more negative meanings of voting, that may have important political outcomes. There is, however, increasing evidence that citizens distinguish between negative campaigning – focusing on negative traits or policy preferences of an opponent – and “dirty” campaigning – political attacks that are perceived to transgress social norms, for instance through incivility or unfair campaigning. In other words, certain effects of negative campaigns seem to be induced by a moral judgment of whether the campaign went too far or not. This could mean that the perceived negativity of a campaign is correlated to less liking of the attacked party but not of the attacking party, while the perceived “dirtiness” of a campaign is correlated to less liking of the attacking party, rather than the attacked party. So why do parties continue to use “dirty” campaigning? Moral judgments about campaigns are likely to depend on both the attack itself and whether it is performed by a party or candidate with which someone identifies (in-party) or a party or candidate with which someone does not identify (out-party). Therefore, we expect that both negative and “dirty” campaigns are more likely to be perceived as “negative” for the in-party and “dirty” for the out-party. Therefore, the backlash effect of “dirty” campaigning on liking the attacking party might mostly be driven by those who did not like them to begin with. I test these expectations in two settings. First, I explore the real-life situation in a cross-sectional study of the correlations between perceptions of negative and dirty campaigning, citizens’ meanings of voting, and attitudes towards political parties. To validate and extend the results, I will conduct a 3 (control/negative /dirty), by 2 (attacking party/candidate) survey experiment. In this experiment, participants will be exposed to manipulated political advertisements, in order to complement the real-life effects of the cross-sectional data in a controlled campaign environment. All data will be collected in March 2022, during the campaign for the legislative elections in Hungary (N = 2000). The findings will help us clarify why negative campaigns have certain effects and enable us to further explore their influence on voting, elections, and democracy.