We investigate the contextual conditions under which campaigns in elections worldwide are fought “negatively”, that is, rely on attacks against political opponents. We test the overarching intuition that societal, political, and cultural conflicts in the country are associated with greater negativity in election campaigns; conflicts, we argue, sow political discord. We test this intuition via a large-scale comparative dataset that covers 136 national elections across more than 100 countries worldwide that happened between June 2016 and March 2020, based on the expert judgments of more than 2000 scholars - to the best of our knowledge, the single largest comparative dataset about the content of elections worldwide. Our results show that countries in which elections are fought under a majoritarian or plurality rule tend to witness higher campaign negativity, and so are countries characterized by higher income inequality, deeper ethnic fragmentation, and higher individualism. Similarly, election competitiveness and ideological diversity of competing actors both tend to be associated with a greater use of negative campaigning, and so is news media preference for sensationalism.

我们调查了全球选举中的竞选活动“消极”进行的背景条件，即依靠对政治对手的攻击。我们检验了一个总体直觉，即该国的社会、政治和文化冲突与竞选活动中更大的消极情绪有关；我们认为，冲突会播下政治不和。我们根据 2000 多名学者的专家判断，通过涵盖 2016 年 6 月至 2020 年 3 月期间发生的全球 100 多个国家的 136 次全国选举的大规模比较数据集来测试这种直觉——据我们所知，关于全球选举内容的最大比较数据集。我们的研究结果表明，在多数主义或多元化统治下进行选举的国家往往会出现更高的竞选消极情绪，而以更高的收入不平等、更严重的种族分裂和更高的个人主义为特征的国家也是如此。同样，选举竞争力和竞争参与者的意识形态多样性都倾向于更多地使用负面竞选活动，新闻媒体对耸人听闻的偏好也是如此。