Going negative amidst (better) alternatives? A comparative study of the contextual determinants of the negative campaigning backlash effect.

Attacking one's political opponents remains a risky endeavour as the backlash against an attacker often cancels out any dent the attack may leave in the support for the target. Despite being central in determining the trade-offs involved in going negative, we still don’t know why the cost of going negative is greater in some cases than in others. We argue that the context of attacks matter and that voters, despite disapproving of negativity in general, are less likely to withdraw political support when they lack better electoral alternatives. We test the availability and ideological attractiveness of alternatives as contextual moderators of the negative campaigning backlash effect at the election, party and voter-level by linking a cross-sectional post-election survey with an expert survey on campaigning strategies, covering the 2019 elections to the European parliament in 28 countries. Estimating mixed effects multi-level models we find support for the moderating effect of alternatives at the voter-level, however not at the party or election-level. The findings constitute a first step towards explaining mixed results in previous studies’ on the NC backlash effect. We discuss their implications against the backdrop of growing negative partisanship and mixed results in previous studies.