The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) - Hardcover

Mattes, Kyle; Redlawsk, David P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022620202X ISBN 13: 9780226202020

Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Turn on the television or sign in to social media during election season and chances are you’ll see plenty of negative campaigning. For decades, conventional wisdom has held that Americans hate negativity in political advertising, and some have even argued that its pervasiveness in recent seasons has helped to drive down voter turnout. Arguing against this commonly held view, Kyle Mattes and David P. Redlawsk show not only that some negativity is accepted by voters as part of the political process, but that negative advertising is necessary to convey valuable information that would not otherwise be revealed.

The most comprehensive treatment of negative campaigning to date, The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning uses models, surveys, and experiments to show that much of the seeming dislike of negative campaigning can be explained by the way survey questions have been worded. By failing to distinguish between baseless and credible attacks, surveys fail to capture differences in voters’ receptivity. Voters’ responses, the authors argue, vary greatly and can be better explained by the content and believability of the ads than by whether the ads are negative. Mattes and Redlawsk continue on to establish how voters make use of negative information and why it is necessary. Many voters are politically naïve and unlikely to make inferences about candidates’ positions or traits, so the ability of candidates to go on the attack and focus explicitly on information that would not otherwise be available is crucial to voter education.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kyle Mattes is assistant professor of political science at the University of Iowa. David P. Redlawsk is professor of political science at the Eagleton Institute’s Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University. He is coauthor of several books, including Why Iowa?, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning

By Kyle Mattes, David P. Redlawsk

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-20202-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
CHAPTER 1. Introduction, 
CHAPTER 2. Voters and Negativity, and Why the Media Can't Help with Stefan Mancevski, 
CHAPTER 3. What Do Voters Think? Social Desirability and Attitudes about Negativity, 
CHAPTER 4. Examining Voter Response to Real Campaign Ads, 
CHAPTER 5. Modeling Negativity, 
CHAPTER 6. That Ad Said What? The Importance of Ad Credibility, 
CHAPTER 7. How the Possibility of Lies Damages Voter Confidence in Negativity, 
CHAPTER 8. Conclusion, 
Appendix A: Details of Video Ads Used in Study 4, 
Appendix B: Appendix to Chapter 5, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Finally, as regards the Roman masses, be sure to put on a good show.... It also wouldn't hurt to remind them of what scoundrels your opponents are and to smear these men at every opportunity with the crimes, sexual scandals, and corruption they have brought on themselves. —Quintus Tullius Cicero

The psyche of the American voter is fragile. If we listen to many scholars and pundits discuss campaign conduct, this must be our inevitable conclusion. Apparently, voters' psyches have been (or will be) damaged irreparably by the onslaught of negativity in recent political campaigns, and so they must be protected from it. If so, voters have been slow to evolve since they have needed to defend themselves against negativity for most of America's electoral history, and probably for as long as there have been elections. The quotation that opens this chapter is from Quintus Tullius Cicero, in a letter to his brother Marcus on the occasion of the latter's campaign for consul of Rome in 64 BCE. While Quintus spends much of the letter talking about schmoozing the various interest groups that would decide the election, he also emphatically details the faults of Marcus's opponents and urges his brother to make sure all voters are aware of them.

Fast forward to one of America's earliest presidential elections. Running for re-election in 1800, John Adams was called a "hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman" by Thomas Jefferson's supporters (Cummins 2007). Adams's camp attacked with similar furor. They suggested that if Jefferson won, "murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes" (Scher 1997, 31). The simple fact is that when zerosum elections result in winners and losers—as they always must—the candidates have a strong incentive to do whatever it takes to win the day. If this means tearing down the opponent while causing voters to become cynical about politics and about campaigns, so be it. Despite would-be reformers' well-intentioned attempts to protect voters through campaign pledges, clean election laws, and their general approbation of attack politics, candidates and their consultants continue to pummel each other as they have since the beginning. Perhaps political campaigns by their nature bring out the worst in candidates and their followers.

While negativity in campaigns is nothing new, there is some evidence that it has become more ubiquitous in recent years, with many scholars arguing the increasing volume of political attacks has deleterious consequences, blaming it for generating cynicism toward politics (e.g., Capella and Jamieson 1997; Dionne 1991), perpetuating a decline in campaign discourse (Jamieson 1992), and demobilization (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995b). Researchers generally agree that voters have an intense dislike of negativity in election campaigns, and the evidence of this disdain appears extensive. For instance, a 2004 survey by Pew found that "negative campaigning" bothered 61 percent of respondents "very much" and another 20 percent "somewhat." In a July 2000 Gallup Poll, 60 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, "Negative advertisements make people feel less like voting on Election Day." And again in 2000, 61 percent of voters said negative ads are "usually full of lies and try to mislead people." Results like these have led to a clear consensus that voters hate negative campaigning, to the point that researchers no longer routinely ask these questions.

As a result of these voter reactions, most discussions of campaign conduct begin with the assumption that negativity is inherently undesirable. Twenty years ago, West (1993) called negative television advertising "the electronic equivalent of the plague." More recently, Patterson (2002) noted that "negative politics appears to wear some people down to the point where they simply want less of politics. Our surveys," he argues, "indicate that a cumulative effect of negative politics, campaign after campaign, is reduced interest in [elections]." Even leaders of the Anglican Church have weighed in against negative campaigning (Watt 2001). Things have apparently not improved since, as Fowler and Ridout (2013) recently described in a paper entitled "Negative, Angry, and Ubiquitous." They write, "Advertising in 2012 was also extremely negative, especially at the presidential level, and frequently evoked the emotion of anger," adding that "whether the negativity will abate in the next presidential election" is an open question. This last point reinforces the idea that "negativity is bad" which is so prevalent in our discourse. But nobody seems to wonder if the positivity will abate.

Meanwhile, political candidates who are the perpetrators of negativity routinely state their opposition to it. Examples abound. Kathleen Brown, in the 1994 California gubernatorial race, ran an ad imploring all candidates to sign her proposal to "run a different kind of campaign. No negative ads bashing your opponent, but instead an election about the issues." During the Senate debate on the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 1997, Sen. John McCain argued that attack ads "do little to further beneficial debate and healthy political dialogue" and that "no one benefits from negative ads." In the same debate, Sen. Dick Durbin said political advertising "has become so negative, so nasty, so dirty, that people are disgusted with it." More recently, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, running for the 2012 Republican nomination for president, claimed that his opponent "Mitt Romney and his Super PAC have spent a staggering $20 million brutally attacking fellow Republicans" and that the "ugly attacks are going to backfire." In the same campaign season, Newark, New Jersey, mayor Cory Booker, commenting on Barack Obama's attacks on Romney, called such ads "nauseating"—all the more ironic since he was on the show as an Obama surrogate. Buchanan (2000) sums up this perspective by arguing that candidates "should emphasize their own plans and qualifications and strike tones much more likely to inspire than alienate." Moreover, at least some research suggests rebound effects, where the perpetrator of the negativity appears to lose ground rather than the intended target.

Of course most people pay little attention to scholars, and they probably assume candidates are not being entirely forthcoming in their condemnation of negativity. But pundits, especially televised ones, have a broad audience. And they, too, seem to simply assume...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022620202X
• ISBN 13: 9780226202020
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar