Ebbs and flows of negative campaigning: A longitudinal study of the influence of contextual factors on Danish campaign rhetoric

Abstract

This article investigates the level of negative campaigning in Danish national election campaigns from 1971 and onwards. The ambition of the article is two-fold. First, it empirically debugs the widespread myth that campaign rhetoric is becoming more and more negative over the years. Second, it theoretically advances the understanding of the determinants of negative campaigning by studying a range of contextual factors that affect the general level of negativity of campaigns. It is thus shown that campaigns get more negative as the number of running parties increases, as the ideological span in the party system widens, and as the degree of political conflict at the time of the election grows.