Negative Election Advertising and Its Impact - Research Paper Example

Negative advertising has steadily increased from the 1960s, and the messages emanating from these campaigns include attacks focused on individuals and their personal characteristics and issues or attacks that may be relevant or irrelevant to issues being handled at that moment. In this context, Jamieson in her researches suggested that negative advertisements focus mainly on an adversary ’s failure and are different from contrast advertisements, where the latter provides “explicit comparisons between the candidates’ qualities, records or proposals” (Jamieson 99).

Researchers have suggested that specific factors often affect the style and mode of negative advertising, such as certain traits of a candidate, characteristics like his or her political status, or gender of the candidate. Researchers further suggest that candidates appearing to trail during campaigns generally prefer using negative advertisements to gain a favorable position. However, when differences between candidates are very small and one candidate is seen to be leading the campaign by a small margin, that person may resort to negative advertising to maintain and the gap and stop the opponents from catching up.

The gender of the main candidate and his or her adversary, party affiliations, and dissimilitude in election funding (between the chief candidate and his opponent) also affect the use of negative advertising.A majority of the researches, until date, have explored negative advertising based on candidate dissimilarities. Various scholars have contended that gender is one of the crucial factors during choosing political campaign strategies where women candidates tend to relay their electoral messages (rhetoric) to the public in a different manner, owing to stereotypes that are gender-based.