ABSTRACT
Negative campaigning has traditionally been considered ‘bad’ for democracy. In addition to the research associated with the demobilization hypothesis, there is the argument that over-negativity in political campaigning decreases voter turnout and, more generally, suppresses enthusiasm for the political process (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995; Ansolabehere et al. 1994; Ansolabehere et al. 1999; Buchanan 2000; Patterson 2002). Pundits, practitioners and academics alike have denounced attack advertisements for their detrimental effects on the information environment (Jamieson 1992; Kamber 1997; Mark 2007). As the argument goes, elections are one of the primary means of communication between potential representatives and the constituency. Campaign advertisements are supposed to function as proposals from candidates on which the citizenry base their decisions when choosing their representative (Riker 1996). A common claim is that attack advertisements are designed to mislead voters or, at least, are more likely to contain misinformation that misleads voters. Another claim can be made on the basis of limited resource allocation. If candidates are allocating funding to criticize their opponents, then they are not spending as much on communicating from their own platforms. Likewise, a voter’s information processing ability is finite, and attention paid to negative advertisements is attention diverted away from positive, supposedly more informative sources. If the above points are valid, and assuming that information and dialogue between representatives and constituents form the basis of a healthy democracy, then the reasonable prescription would be to curtail negative campaigning for the sake of democracy.
