The impact of public approval on the use of negativity throughout the electoral cycle

Abstract

The literature has found that politicians who lag behind in public approval ratings during campaigns resort to more negativity. However, the actual impact of approval on the use of negativity during the electoral cycle has yet to be addressed. Furthermore, due to the short-lived nature of campaigns, current studies have been unable to establish a directional causal link between approval ratings and negativity. This article addresses these gaps by: (i) building a theory for understanding the impact of public approval on the use of negativity throughout the electoral cycle; and (ii) methodologically testing this impact on a time series basis. Using data on negativity in parliaments, the results confirm that low approval ratings lead to more negativity closer to elections in Belgium (2014–2020) and Croatia (2010–2021). In the UK (2010–2020), however, approval does not appear to be a significant predictor of negativity use. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the use of negativity by political actors outside campaigns.

Keywords:

• Electoral cycle
• negativity
• parliaments
• political actors
• public approval

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented at an online workshop on ‘Negative Politics’ (11–12 November 2021). I would like to thank the participants for providing feedback on that version, in particular Loes Aaldering, Chiara Vargiu and Alessandro Nai. The paper also benefitted greatly from comments that came from anonymous reviewers and members of the M²P (Media, Movements & Politics) research group at the University of Antwerp, especially Stefaan Walgrave and Julie Sevenans. I also thank PromocijaPlus for providing a share of data used in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For less significant findings, see Walter et al. (2014) and Hansen and Pedersen (2008).

2 While these descriptive findings are interesting and deserve attention, they are beyond the scope and goal of this article.

3 While a point can be made that third parties in Croatia should be included in this data due to the country’s multi-party system, there was no reason to expect that public approval has an impact on these parties. Croatian third parties predominantly group around the two main ones for the election and post-election formation of a coalition. Therefore, it could be argued that these parties are more affected by the approval ratings of the two dominant parties. Furthermore, these parties have limited possibilities to calculate how to approach strategically QTs, given that some of them will be granted a few or no questions during QTs.

4 PVDA-PTB is the only party in Belgium that runs for office both in Flanders and Wallonia, so the share of citizens that intend to vote for this party is calculated by looking at the average of citizens that intend to vote for it in both regions.

5 Different operationalisation of the electoral cycle (where months indicate time left until the regular end of the parliamentary term or the date of the actual elections) was used as a robustness check (Online Appendix G).

6 To ensure that lags in Belgium stayed within a reasonable time frame of influence, every approval poll that was included in Belgium dated back to maximum one month before a particular QT (as in Croatia and the UK).

7 The realistic low and high approval values are based on standard deviation from the mean approval per country indicated in Table 1. For example, with the mean approval of 15% in Belgium, which has standard deviation of 7%, we can conclude that the realistic high approval in Belgium is around 22%, while the realistic low approval is around 8%.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Antwerp Research Fund (BOF) under grant number 43834.

Notes on contributors

Željko Poljak

Željko Poljak is a PhD candidate and a member of the M²P (Media, Movements & Politics) research group at the Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp. His current research deals with negative communication between political actors both outside and during election campaigns. [[email protected]]