Twitter Taunts and Tirades: Negative Campaigning in the Age of Trump

Politics

Articles

In an age characterized by polarization in American politics and an expanding role for electronic media in campaigns, the time is ripe for an examination of candidate conflict conducted via social media. Scholars have previously sought to gauge the impact of "going negative," attacking opponents based on their personal traits, issue positions, or the political party to which they belong (Surlin and Gordon 1977; Skaperdas and Grofman 1995). As Peterson and Djupe (2005) note, most research of this sort has focused upon the effects of negative campaigning on voter turnout (Peterson and Djupe 2005; Djupe and Peterson 2002; Kahn and Kenney 1999; Ansolabehere et al. 1994) and vote choice (Lau et al. 2007; Kaid 1997). Relatively few studies have investigated driving factors of the choice to attack opponents; scholarship far more often treats campaign tone as an explanatory variable than as an outcome to be explained. To be sure, these two types of questions are not unrelated: if candidates and their advisors believe negative messages are likely to be effective, they will be more likely to employ them (Lau and Rovner 2009). To the extent that such considerations are strategic, however, they are as likely to be driven by intuition and prior experience as by research. So the question of what drives negative campaigning is not reducible to the question of when such a strategy is likely to be effective.

Empirical work treating negative campaigning as a dependent variable has focused on press releases (Flowers, Haynes, and Crespin 2003; Haynes, Flowers, and Gurian 2002), campaign advertisements (Hale, Fox, and Farmer 1996; Kahn and Kenney 1999; Damore 2002), and news reports (Haynes and Rhine 1998; Djupe and Peterson 2002; Peterson and Djupe 2005). In the 2016 US presidential primary season, social media have emerged as an important weapon in the campaign messaging arsenal, with Twitter¹taking center stage. When it comes to newsworthy events such as a presidential campaign, Twitter's audience is no longer limited to Twitter users; tweets themselves have become news and thus, essentially free advertising for candidates. For the first time, all candidates in a large field are active on Twitter and have used the platform to provide running commentary, allowing us to witness the emergence of negativity in real...