Political campaigns are often dark and ruthless affairs in which candidates will think little of trying to smear their opponent.  New research from Bocconi University suggests that when two candidates engage in such attacks, the only person that benefits is the 3rd candidate.

The research explains that around 55% of the ads aired during the 2016 presidential election were negative in nature, but of course, in US politics, there is seldom a 3rd candidate to reap the rewards of these tactics.

Mixed messaging

In a mayoral race in Italy during 2015, however, that was not the case, and the researchers were able to randomize door-to-door canvassing activity undertaken by supporters of the challengers to the incumbent.  This meant that a third of the electorate were given positive messages, a third negative messaging about the incumbent, and a third no information at all.

“We found a strong, positive spillover effect of negative campaigning on the idle candidate, whose vote share increased by 3.7% when the incumbent was attacked with a negative ad by the other challenger—a gain of about 13% with respect to the idle candidate’s average vote share,” the researchers say.

This was then followed up by a lab experiment involving nearly 3,000 participants.  In the experiment, the election candidates were all designed to have similar characteristics with no real ideological differences.  As before, one of the three candidates gave a series of messages that were either positive, negative, or neutral.

The results show that when each of the candidates campaigned positively, the main challenger received 29.4% of the vote.  When the challenger attacked the incumbent, however, their vote plummeted to just 14.9%, with most of these lost votes going to the 3rd candidate who wasn’t involved in the exchange.  Their vote share leapt from 35.9% during positive campaigning to 54.4%.

The researchers believe their results highlight the harm that can befall candidate’s campaigns when they engage in aggressive tactics towards opponents.  They argue that when candidates attack their opponent, it merely raises the credibility of the opponent in the eyes of voters, while also showing the attacker to be competitive rather than cooperative, which is not a trait we look for.  Will that result in cleaner elections in the future?  Time will tell.