Negative Campaigns, Negative Votes? Meanings of Voting and Political Campaigns

Abstract

Negative campaigns can have different effects on voting behavior and political attitudes. While recent work has differentiated between contexts and campaigns, few have investigated the mechanisms underlying the effects of negative campaigns. We argue that negative campaigning may affect whether citizens understand voting as supporting one candidate or party (positive meanings of voting), as opposing another (negative meanings of voting), or even as something useless, unpleasant or undesirable (anti-voting meanings). Using preregistered cross-sectional analyses in the 2022 Hungarian and US elections, we confirm that negative and anti-voting meanings are pervasive, and related to political parties’ use of negative and “dirty” campaigns. Two preregistered survey experiments, however, only confirm the effects of the most outrageous campaign messages. We conclude that meanings of voting are important democratic attitudes that are related to parties’ campaigning behavior. However, they are relatively stable attitudes that are only affected by relatively extreme stimuli.