These last years, the topic of negative campaigning, especially outside the US, has attracted growing attention in political science literature. One of typical question scholars have aimed to answer is to what extent the pattern and degree of competition between parties increases the use of negative statements about opponents during electoral campaigns. Standard theoretical models of the phenomenon assume that the party lagging behind in the polls is more likely to engage in such a strategy (Skaperdas and Grofman, 1995; Harrington and Hess, 1996). However, this explanation, originally developed to fit the US context, is hard to adapt to European multi-party political systems, because in those political systems, the accession to office, which is a common operationalization of “winning” and “losing”, is as much dependent on electoral results as on negotiations between party elites.
In this paper, we argue that the absence of a clear operationalization of the concept of a party leading or winning an election in multi-party settings has led scholars to conclude that there is no competition-effect on negative campaigning in this context (Elmelund-Præstekær, 2010, Walter, van der Brug, & P. van Praag, forthcoming). To gain further and more detailed insight, this paper considers various operationalizations of party competition and applies them to the natural laboratory of Swiss politics, where government's appointments are not directly dependent on legislative electoral results. The data for this investigation was gathered within the framework of the Making Electoral Democracy Work project and includes party manifestos, newspaper ads, letters to the editor, and press coverage of over 30 party entities for a period spanning three months before the 2011 cantonal elections in Zürich and Lucerne and before the federal election held the same year. The analysis is also complemented by semi-structured interviews with campaign managers.
