Partisan Ambivalence and Negative Campaigns: A Survey Experiment

Abstract

Studies show that going negative does not always work in political campaigns, and yet candidates and consultants are rational people whose experience has persuaded them that it can be a winning strategy under the right circumstances. As scholars continue to explore what those circumstances might be, recent work by Lavine, Johnston, and Steenbergen (2012), suggests that when a stimulus/cue prompts partisan ambivalence, motivated reasoning should vitiate and a focus on the substance of the frame should increase. Based on this logic, it follows that a campaign attack against one’s opponent will be more effective among voters who express a mix of positive and negative feelings toward the parties because they are more focused on the substance of the attack than those who are less ambivalent. The following study uses experimental data derived from a national Internet survey of registered voters to examine the effectiveness of both campaign attacks and candidates’ responses (rebuttals) to those attacks among subjects with varying levels of partisan ambivalence. Our results show that ambivalence plays an occasionally meaningful but inconsistent moderating role across a range of campaign scenarios, more so with attacks than with responses.