Keywords: Electoral polls in emerging/incomplete democracies

Negativity (i.e. criticism or unfavorable portrayals of political actors and their actions) is one of the key features of modern election campaigns. However, there is a lot of evidence that the particular level of negativity differs from country to country and from election to election. This raises the question what factors are responsible for the differential use of negative communication in election campaigns. Although there is a large body of literature on the factors driving the level of negativity in campaign communication, most of the research is (1) focusing on the U.S. and (2) refers to specific instruments of campaign communication (particularly campaign advertising). In contrast to this, comparative research and research focusing on a more general use of negative campaign communication is rare. The proposed paper makes a significant contribution to this strand of research by investigating the general level of negativity in an election campaign across several dozens of countries across the world.

We claim that four clusters of variables can influence the general level of negativity: the political system (e.g., the type of democracy, the election system), social cleavages (e.g., economic, religious, or ethnic conflicts), the structure of political competition (e.g., number of competing parties or politicians, ideological polarization, closeness of the race), and the media coverage of a campaign (e.g., amount of coverage, fairness of coverage, focus on conflicts).

Based on a sample of 59 elections held between June 2016 and November 2017 worldwide we analyze the impact of the identified clusters. Our data consists of (1) information of online expert surveys conducted after each election. Based on the perceptions of the experts, we measure our dependent variable (i.e. the perceived level of negativity). Furthermore, most of the variables assigned to the clusters "structure of political competition" and "media coverage" are based on expert ratings. Furthermore, we (2) collected a wide range of context variables for the elections under investigation. This data is mainly used to measure the structure of the political system and the existence of social cleavages.

Our results indicate that the way the media is covering elections has by far the largest impact on the perceived level of negativity. In particular, the media’s coverage of policy differences as well as of attacks and negative campaigning between the competing parties and candidate fuel to the reported levels of negativity of an election campaign. Compared to this, effects of the political system and the structure of the political competition are less prominent. Furthermore, social cleavages to not have a systematic effect on the perceived level of negative campaign communication. In addition, for some aspects of the political system, the structure of the political competition, and social cleavages we find significant interaction effects with the media coverage of the campaign. These findings suggest that potentially conflict-containing patterns of a democracy, society, or a political competition only become relevant when the media pays attention to it.