Going negative

Drawing on both laboratory experiments and the real world of America's presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional races, the authors show that negative advertising drives down voter turnout - in some cases dramatically - and that political consultants intentionally use ads for this very purpose. In the 1992 presidential election, by the authors' calculation, over 6 million votes were lost to negative campaigns. Negative ads work better for Republicans than for Democrats, and better for men than for women; unfortunately, negative ads also work better in general than positive ones, so…