Who Will Attack the Competitors? How Political Parties Resolve Strategic and Collective Action Dilemmas in Negative Campaigning

Autor(en)
Martin Dolezal, Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, Wolfgang Claudius Müller
Abstrakt

Negative campaigning presents parties with a collective action problem. While parties would prefer to have their competitors attacked, potential backlash effects from negative messages mean that individual politicians typically lack the incentives to carry out such attacks. We theorize that parties solve this problem by implementing a division of labour that takes into account the incentives of individual office holders, their availability for campaign activity, and media relevance. Drawing on these arguments we expect that holders of high public office and party leaders are less likely to issue attacks, leaving the bulk of the ‘dirty work’ to be carried out by party floor leaders and general secretaries. Examining almost 8,000 press releases issued by over 600 individual politicians during four election campaigns in Austria, we find strong support for our theoretical expectations.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Staatswissenschaft
Journal
Party Politics
Band
23
Seiten
666-679
Anzahl der Seiten
14
ISSN
1354-0688
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068815619832
Publikationsdatum
2015
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
506014 Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Sociology and Political Science
Link zum Portal
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/who-will-attack-the-competitors-how-political-parties-resolve-strategic-and-collective-action-dilemmas-in-negative-campaigning(6a7c0b7f-68f2-492c-a639-81e187660d42).html