Do Voters Perceive Negative Campaigns as Informative Campaigns?: American Politics Research

We argue that citizens distinguish the tone of a campaign from the quality of information that it provides and that evaluations on each dimension respond differently to positive and negative political advertising. We test these claims using survey and advertising data from the 2000 presidential campaign and two 1998 gubernatorial races. In each race, citizens separate judgments about the tone of a campaign from judgments about the quality of information they have received. Furthermore, negative campaigning affects the former, but not the latter, set of evaluations. These results have implications for the debate over the impact of negative advertising and for how citizens perceive campaigns as political processes. Keywords elections, political campaigns, political advertising, negative advertising, voting Campaigns are key political moments because they bring citizens and leaders in closer contact and provide citizens opportunities to learn about and choose among those who want to represent them. Scholars have lauded campaigns for their ability to communicate information that helps citizens make voting decisions. At the same time, the conventional wisdom goes, Americans dis-like campaigns, and negative campaigning—the criticisms that candidates make of one another—is a primary cause of this aversion