The traditional way to measure the tone of an electoral campaign is through content analyze of the political discourse. The issue then is which discourse should be analyzed, especially from a comparative perspective. The most commonly available source is party manifestos, which exist in about every country. The problem is that party manifestos may not reflect the actual discourse employed by the parties or candidates during a campaign. From that perspective, debates and ads appear to be more appropriate but they have the disadvantage of not being universal and/or directly comparable, as certain countries ban TV ads and as the format of TV debates varies considerably across countries.
Given all these problems, we suggest that expert judgments might provide a valuable measure of campaign negativity. We review the debate on the use of expert judgments with respect to party policy positioning (see especially the special symposium in the March 2007 issue of Electoral Studies) and discuss the implications for the study of campaign negativity. We then present preliminary findings about the 2012 Quebec election from the Making Electoral Democracy Work project. After the election, 25 experts provided their assessment of the positivity/negativity of each party’s campaign, on a 0 to 10 scale. We analyze experts’ responses to the survey, we compare their judgments with the manifestos, debates and advertisements, and we provide a preliminary evaluation of the merits and limits of using experts to characterize the positivity/negativity of election campaigns.
