Candidate Strategy and the Decision to Go Negative

Abstract

The research examining negative campaigning has focused largely on the effects that exposure to negative advertising has on voters' decisionmaking. Less attention has been given to studying the conditions that motivate candidates to employ negative campaign tactics. I attempt to move our understanding of this process forward by unifying hypotheses suggested in the literature into a more cohesive theoretical framework and testing them against data collected from all available campaign advertisements produced by major party presidential candidates competing in the 1976-1996 general elections. The results of the logit analysis indicate that candidates' decisions to go negative are a function of changes to the campaign environment, the dynamic interplay that develops between candidates over the course of campaigns, and attributes of issues on the campaign agenda.