Negative Campaigning

lightning_palm · 2023-01-21T11:43:36+00:00

From the THE DECISION TO ATTACK: WHEN, HOW, AND WHO? section:

A review of the circumstances under which candidates go negative would be incomplete without assessing whether candidates adopt different message strategies depending on their gender and that of the opposition. Kahn and Kenney (Kahn 1993, Kahn & Kenny 2000) find that gender does indeed factor into a candidate's decision to attack. However, their research has yielded somewhat inconsistent results. Kahn's 1993 study examining the campaign messages of 38 candidates for U.S. Senate in the 1984 and 1986 races revealed that although both male and female candidates prefer policy-based messages over candidate-oriented appeals, men make use of negative ads less frequently and are particularly reluctant to go negative against female opponents, for fear of being perceived as “beating up on a woman” (Kahn 1993, p. 491). She argued that regardless of candidate status (incumbent or challenger), the messages delivered by female candidates tend to reflect those of underdogs, exhibiting a greater proportion of negativism than their opponents demonstrate.

Less than a decade later, Kahn & Kenney (2000) again compared the communicative styles of male and female senatorial candidates, now spanning the 1988, 1990, and 1992 campaigns. They found female candidates consistently less likely than male candidates—regardless of candidate status—to go negative. Identifying five categories of negative ads (attack, comparative, negative-trait, negative-issue, and criticism), Kahn & Kenney found that male challengers consistently launch more negative appeals than their female counterparts, and in particular are 10% more likely to run negative-issue ads. This finding is consistent with the bivariate results reported by Lau & Pomper (2001, 2004). When closeness of race is taken into account, the differences are even more stark; the frequency of male-sponsored attacks greatly increases with competitiveness, whereas female candidates are more consistent. The two studies are not entirely contradictory, however. Kahn and Kenney confirm that male candidates remain far more aggressive toward other males than toward female opponents, attacking 56% of the time as opposed to 39%.

Kahn and Kenney's inconsistent findings, and the null effect of gender in a multivariate analysis reported by Lau & Pomper (2001, 2004), cast doubt on any speculation that female candidates adhere to a softer style and more stereotypically feminine cultural norms while male candidates are more aggressive and cut-throat. This skepticism is supported by Procter et al. (1994), who examine the use of negative advertising in eight 1990 U.S. Senate campaigns and eight gubernatorial campaigns from the same year, all of which featured a female candidate against a male opponent. Procter et al. find that male and female candidates do not differ in their use of negative advertising. Female candidates are no less likely to strike first, do not manipulate ad formats to soften their own images, and do not shy away from attacking their opponent's personal ethics or issue positions. Procter et al.'s findings illustrate that decisions to go negative and decisions concerning how to strike are not reflections of a candidate's gender but rather of a formulaic calculus that is unaffected by gender. We should mention one important caveat here: Research on the contrasting campaign styles of male and female candidates when they oppose each other suffers from the absence of an important comparison group, female-versus-female races. There are still too few examples of statewide races where major party female candidates oppose each other.

Title	Negative Campaigning
Author	lightning_palm
Upvotes	4
Comments	1
Date	January 21, 2023 11:41 AM UTC (3 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/Male_Studies
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/Male_Studies/comments/10hpdj0/negative_campaigning/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/Male_Studies/negative-campaigning.1215616 https://theredarchive.com/post/1215616

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