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://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/6a7c0b7f-68f2-492c-a639-81e187660d42