1
I. Introduction
Americans love to hate both negative advertising and political campaigns. Eighty-two percent of
Americans believe that “negative, attack-oriented campaigning is undermining and damaging our democracy”
and a majority believe that unethical practices in campaigns occur “very” or “fairly” often (58%).
1
The
conventional wisdom is that these two aversions must be related. The notion that negative advertising leads
to lower turnout (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995) seems to imply this relationship: voters’ aversion to
negativity produces dissatisfaction with the candidates and the campaign, which in turn leads voters to stay
home on Election Day. However, the connection between negative advertising and lower turnout is far
from certain (see Lau et al. 1999 for a review). One potential explanation for the uncertain reality of
“demobilization” is that voters’ perceptions of and response to negative campaigning might be more complex
than a simple and inevitable aversion.
In this paper, we examine the 1998 and 2002 California gubernatorial elections to investigate whether
voters recognize negative advertising and respond with greater dislike for the candidates and the campaign.
Our investigation draws on three different sources of data. First, we combine time-series survey data on
perceptions of negativity in the 1998 California gubernatorial race with content analysis of advertisements
aired during the same time period. This analysis shows how voter opinions about the conduct of the
candidates relate to changes in the actual negativity of the race. Second, we analyze a survey of Californians
conducted near the end of the 2002 gubernatorial campaign to assess what individual-level characteristics
produce aversion to negativity; we then compare these factors to those that influence voter satisfaction with
the campaign. Third, we use a series of focus groups conducted in California during the fall of 2002 to
explore how people’s perceptions of what constitutes a “negative ad” differ.
Each set of evidence illustrates the lack of a one-to-one relationship between negative campaigning
and perceptions of negativity, and between aversion to negativity and dissatisfaction with the campaign and
candidates. We show that voters do not perceive negativity uniformly or unambiguously. We show that
voters do not necessarily see negativity as unequivocally bad. We also show that attributes that lead voters to
countenance negativity, the most prominent of which is political involvement, also lead them to quite harsh
We are grateful to Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of
Pennsylvania, Michael Hagen of Rutgers University, and Richard Johnston of the University of British Columbia for
providing some of the survey data used herein. Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group was instrumental
in helping to reconstruct the advertising data. The CMAG data were purchased with a grant provide by the Institute of
Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. We thank Bruce Cain for helping to secure this funding.
Other data in this paper were collected in partnership with the Public Policy Institute of California, with funding
provided by the Pew Charitable Trusts to the Institute of Governmental Studies. Dan Schnur authored the original
grant proposal and Bruce Cain is its principal investigator. Jon Cohen, Lisa Cole, Dorie Appollonio, and Mark
Baldassare of PPIC were instrumental in helping to design the survey and entirely responsible for its implementation.
Mr. Cohen and Ms. Cole also conducted some of the focus groups. None of those entities or persons bears any
responsibility for the analysis and conclusions herein.
1
These figures come from a November 1999 survey conducted by Lake Snell Perry & Associates for the Pew Charitable
Trusts and the Institute for Global Ethics, and from a September 2000 survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, Inc.
for the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University.
Convention