Negative advertising is frequent in electoral campaigns, despite its ambiguous effectiveness: Negativity may reduce voters' evaluation of the targeted politician but may have a backlash effect for the attacker. We study the effect of negative advertising in electoral races with more than two candidates with a large‐scale field experiment during an electoral campaign for mayor in Italy and a survey experiment in a fictitious mayoral campaign. In our field experiment, we find a strong, positive spillover effect on the third main candidate (neither the target nor the attacker). This effect is confirmed in our survey experiment, which creates a controlled environment with no ideological components or strategic voting. The negative ad has no impact on the targeted incumbent, has a sizable backlash effect on the attacker, and largely benefits the idle candidate. The attacker is perceived as less cooperative, less likely to lead a successful government, and more ideologically extreme.

{ American Journal of Political Science | Continue Reading }

By controlling these other features – such as the follower count, verified accounts and the use of multimedia in tweets – the authors set out to assess whether the use of sentiment terms affected the probability of retweets. To quantify the effect of negativity and positivity they employed three Spanish sentiment lexicons. Negative sentiment, at least when it comes to the subject of politics, increased the chances of retweets, the authors found, but acknowledged that other features did play a role in predicting tweet virality.

{ The Guardian | Continue Reading }