ABSTRACT This paper investigates whether parties’ issue attacks can successfully discredit their rivals’ issue evaluations. Existing research demonstrates how a party can influence voters’ perceptions of itself on a single dimension of issue competition, but research showing the impact of negative campaigning on parties’ issue evaluations remains limited. Based on novel experimental evidence, we test the impact of three different types of issue attacks – attacking the rival’s position, competence, or commitment on the issue – on voters’ evaluations of the rival party on three issue dimensions, namely position, competence, and commitment. The findings indicate that commitment and position attacks depress the rival party’s issue evaluations on that dimension, whereas competence attacks do not. Moreover, positional attacks lower position evaluations and competence evaluations but increase commitment evaluations. Finally, the effectiveness of attacks varies between issues, and party preference moderates the effects of issue attacks.

中文翻译：

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负面影响选民的问题考虑。各方攻击通信的实验研究

摘要 本文调查了当事人的问题攻击是否能够成功地诋毁对手的问题评估。现有研究表明，政党如何在议题竞争的单一维度上影响选民对自己的看法，但表明负面竞选对政党议题评估的影响的研究仍然有限。基于新的实验证据，我们测试了三种不同类型的问题攻击——攻击对手在问题上的地位、能力或承诺——对选民在三个问题维度上对对手党的评价的影响，即立场、能力和承诺。研究结果表明，承诺和立场攻击会抑制对手方在该维度上的问题评估，而能力攻击则不会。而且，位置攻击降低了位置评估和能力评估，但增加了承诺评估。最后，攻击的有效性因问题而异，而政党偏好会缓和问题攻击的影响。