How can you be a more vigilant voter in elections?

 Given my research interests, I usually monitor the majority of the forms of contest; one of these forms is elections. From my point of view, when I see modern politics nowadays, I notice that candidates or political parties focus much more on criticizing or attacking their opponents rather than focusing on one’s positive attributes. This strategy has a clear definition. This is a Negative campaigning strategy. These campaigns often involve attacking the opponent's character, record, or position on issues. Negative campaigning can take various forms, including attack ads on television, radio, or social media, as well as negative messaging in speeches, debates, and campaign literature. The main purpose of the negative campaign is to seed doubt in the rival candidate's support regarding the opponent’s fit for office.

There are some reasons why this strategy is valuable for politicians:

Highlighting Contrasts: By focusing on the flaws or weaknesses of opponents, candidates can emphasize the differences between themselves and their rivals, making their own positions or qualities appear more favorable by comparison.

Mobilizing Supporters: Negative campaigns can energize a candidate's base by rallying them against a common enemy. Voters who are strongly opposed to the opponent may be more motivated to turn out and vote.

Undermining Opponents: Negative ads can damage an opponent's reputation and credibility, potentially reducing their support among undecided voters or causing supporters to reconsider their allegiance.

Shaping Perceptions: Negative campaigning can shape voters' perceptions of the opponent, framing them in a negative light and potentially influencing how they are viewed by the public.

However, there are a few reasons why negative campaigning also has its drawbacks:

Backlash: Voters may become disillusioned or turned off by negative campaigning, viewing it as petty or unproductive. This could lead to a backlash against the candidate employing such tactics. Some negative attacks may be seen as unfair or overly aggressive, causing sympathy for the opponent or leading voters to question the credibility of the attacker.

Damage to Civility: Negative campaigning can contribute to a decline in the overall tone of political discourse, fostering division and polarization within society.

Risk of Backfiring: Focus on Issues: Negative campaigning often detracts from substantive policy discussions, potentially depriving voters of important information about candidates' positions and proposals.

Here are some real-life examples of negative campaigning from various political contexts:

• In the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the Obama campaign ran ads criticizing Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, portraying him as a corporate raider who laid off workers for profit (link).
• During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton engaged in extensive negative campaigning against each other, with Trump labeling Clinton as "Crooked Hillary" and Clinton portraying Trump as unfit for office (link).
• In the UK, during the 2019 general election campaign, various political parties released attack ads targeting their opponents' policies and leadership qualities. For instance, the Conservative Party ran ads accusing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn of being weak on national security (link).

These examples demonstrate how negative campaigning is a common strategy used in various political contexts around the world, from national elections to local races and referendums. Throw evidence of negative campaigns might have been found many years ago. In many cases, Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign started this form of negative campaign that we have now (link). Throw in our days is much more aggressive (from my point of view).

To understand the effect of the negative campaign, let’s look at this situation using game theoretical or proxies contest theoretical glasses. Regarding contest theory, we can look at the election as a contest where two forms of effort are exerted. The productive effort increases the contestant's (candidate or party) probability of winning, and the sabotaging effort decreases the probability of the consistent rival winning. The second form of effort is the effort exerted in a negative campaign.

The main question now is what contest theory can say about the effect of negative campaigns and how this campaign affects us, the voters.

These are the main insights from contest theoretical research in the field:

·         Adverse selection - Sabotage may lead to adverse selection of contestants. Namely, the best possible participants might refrain from participating altogether. In other words, the best politician might drop out of the election, and we will stay with the lower types of politicians (these results can be seen in many countries).

·         Information issues - Sabotage may prevent the contest organizer from allowing proper information flow and destroying valuable output. As voters, we are the contest organizers in case of an election, and thus, we won’t be able to choose the right candidate party because of the information issue.

·         Resources expended on sabotage behavior are unproductive and hence wasteful. Money is thrown in the garbage.

·         Discouragement effect - The expectation of being sabotaged has a discouragement effect, which causes the participants to reduce their productive efforts. Namely, we will see politicians exert effort mainly in the negative campaigns (that is what indeed happens) and not in the positive campaigns. Namely, we will not know why to vote for a specific candidate, but we will know only why not to vote for him and since the information issue is also partial information.

·         Election attractiveness - Sabotage may reduce the attractiveness of the contest. In other words, fewer people will appear to vote on election day, and by that, will see more bias in the election outcome.

In the sum of all the bullets above, we can see that negative campaigns, in general, damage us as voters and hurt our decision-making to make the proper candidate choice.

The next question is what contest theory can teach us, the voters, how to reduce the level of negative campaigns. The most trivial is to reduce benefits from sabotaging or negative campaigns or to increase the cost of sabotaging. To pay attention to the campaign's narrative, punish the sabotaging politicians/parties by not choosing them, and reduce the incentives to be involved in negative campaigns.

In conclusion, contest theory provides valuable insights into the detrimental effects of negative campaigning on political contests and voter decision-making. By understanding these dynamics, voters can advocate for reforms to mitigate the prevalence of negative campaigns and uphold the principles of informed constructive democracy.

The pictures in this post were taken from Unsplash.