When conflict fuels negativity. A large-scale comparative investigation of the contextual drivers of negative campaigning in elections worldwide

We investigate the contextual conditions under which campaigns in elections worldwide are fought “negatively”, that is, rely on attacks against political opponents. We test the overarching intuition that societal, political, and cultural conflicts in the country are associated with greater negativity in election campaigns; conflicts, we argue, sow political discord. We test this intuition via a large‐scale comparative dataset that covers 136 national elections across more than 100 countries worldwide that happened between June 2016 and March 2020, based on the expert judgments of more than 2000 scholars ‐ to the best of our knowledge, the single largest comparative dataset about the content of elections worldwide. Our results show that countries in which elections are fought under a majoritarian or plurality rule tend to witness higher campaign negativity, and so are countries characterized by higher income inequality, deeper ethnic fragmentation, and higher individualism. Similarly, election competitiveness and ideological diversity of competing actors both tend to be associated with a greater use of negative campaigning, and so is news media preference for sensationalism.