Negative Campaigning belongs to German campaigns from the beginning of the Federal Republic up to now. Despite this the political actors would never say about themselves that they are using Negative Campaigning. The public opinion about Negative Campaigning is negative. It is much more seen as mudslinging, lying and playing dirty tricks and not as a legitimate campaign tactic. Despite a lot of examples of Negative Campaigning in the past, not much research has been done about the impact yet. Because of the low research interest in the last decades, no one knows how exactly it works and how effective it is in Germany. In the US there are many different studies with different methodological designs on the impact of Negative Campaigning. Since there is very little research in Germany which could be used to break the first ground.
The main idea of the paper is that Negative Campaigning in Germany works in a quite different way compared to the US. That is the reason a psychological experiment is done to find out how the impact of a direct attack is compared to a comparative attack and positive campaigning concerning changing the attitude of voters. The subjects (130 Students from the University of Jena) have seen three different types of newspaper advertisement.
The results show some interesting findings. The voters do not like direct attacks, but they do not see a difference between comparative attacks und positive campaigning. Negative Campaigning is much more a risk for the attacker then it has an impact on the attacked party. For the impact it is much more important how the voters see and feel the attack then the attacker thinks how it should work.
