Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m. phone call” ad has been parsed again and again since the March 4 primaries, with most pundits using it to launch their quadrennial protests that campaign ad negativity weakens the very fabric of our democracy by manipulating and misinforming voters. But tirades against negativity reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of elections. Negativity is essential to democratic politics and ultimately yields a more engaged and better-informed public.
The public needs to know the good and the bad about candidates to make an informed judgment. Think about it: Is it really wrong for Clinton to go after Barack Obama on his relative inexperience in national and international politics? Is it out of bounds for Obama to hold Clinton accountable for her early support of the Iraq war? Should John McCain be forbidden from discussing Obama’s liberal voting record? Is it unfair for Obama to talk about McCain’s lack of interest in economic issues?
Voters need answers to such questions. Whether we like it or not, attack ads and the debate they trigger offer an invaluable way to develop those answers. All candidates bring strengths and weaknesses to the table. How do we learn about the weaknesses without their being discussed and debated? In fact, the real problem is not attack ads but all the hand-wringing by observers over the supposedly pernicious effects of negative campaigning. These misinformed judgments about attack ads, based mostly on impressions and anecdotes rather than fact, yield only more misinformation.
We take issue with three common assumptions about negative advertising: that the rise of television has made presidential campaigns more negative; that there’s a deleterious connection between advertising content and citizen engagement; and that an informative debate must be a positive debate.
Often pundits talk about a longing for the “good old days” of elections. But American campaigns have never been positive undertakings filled with high-brow rhetoric. In the 1800s alone, Thomas Jefferson was attacked as the “anti-Christ,” Andrew Jackson’s wife was called a prostitute, and Abraham Lincoln was described as a “horrid-looking wretch” unfit to lead.
Even though the volume and negative tone of advertising on television has grown over the last few decades, it hasn’t even approached the nastiness of those days. More important, there’s little evidence that exposure to negative advertising has ill effects on the public. The great majority of scholarly studies, including our own, demonstrates that exposure to negative advertising engages and informs citizens. Consider that in 2004, one of the most negative campaigns in modern times, turnout was up about 5 percentage points from 2000, and the public was more aware of what the major party candidates stood for than in 2000.
Part of the reason negative ads have this beneficial effect is that they are more substantive than positive ads. Our research shows negative ads are more likely to focus on issues, are more specific and contain many more facts than positive ads. They enhance political interest and familiarity with the candidates’ qualifications more than positive ads, which, in turn, raises citizens’ likelihood of voting. In short, negative ads are more likely than positive ads to foster the kind of engagement we all want from the American electorate.
Negativity also provides a chance to evaluate and assess how candidates might handle the tough scrutiny that goes along with being president. Was Obama forceful enough in his response to the “3 a.m.” ad? Has Clinton mishandled the many criticisms leveled against her and her campaign? The answers are important to voters as they decide who should be the next commander in chief.
This defense of negativity doesn’t mean there is nothing to criticize about American campaigns. Citizens do not know as much about politics or participate as much as they should. Politicians are obsessed with reelection and often ignore important issues. The news media too frequently focus on the horse race and not on candidates’ views. Many negative ads unfairly, even scurrilously, isolate candidates’ votes or statements and are often funded in ways that skirt campaign finance laws. We all know that our system is not perfect.
But our evidence shows that negativity is not to blame for the ills that plague our politics. Negativity, in fact, is an underappreciated asset of democratic politics.
John G. Geer is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and the author of “In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns.” Ken Goldstein is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the coauthor of “Campaign Advertising and American Democracy.”
This op-ed ran in the L.A. Times on March 17, 2008.
Media contact: Ann Marie Owens, (615) 322-NEWS
annmarie.owens@vanderbilt.edu