Negative campaigning: A cross-national perspective

Price Governance Salon featuring Scott Desposato, UCSD. Why do some political systems have more negative campaigning than others? How does that affect the quality of democracy and the information levels of voters? And what should policy-makers do about it? While questions of campaign strategy and campaign impact have been thoroughly studied in the context of the United States’ plurality single-member district elections and two-party system, we know significantly less about campaign strategy in the diversity of the developing world. Using a new database of over 15,000 political advertisements from Latin America, I’ll discuss the causes and effects of negative campaigning outside the United States.