When Parties (Dis)Orientate Voters: The Effect of Negativity on Ambivalence
(2024) Annual Conference of the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) — Location: Seoul, South Korea (28.July.2024)
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- Abstract
- Public opinion studies have consistently highlighted that a significant proportion of the electorate holds ambivalent attitudes towards various issues and political parties. While it is commonly acknowledged that a certain level of ambivalence within th e population is inevitable, primarily due to the dynamic and evolving nature of individuals’ opinions, the drivers of voters’ ambivalence remain largely obscure. Our study wants to contribute to this debate by testing whether parties’ styles of communication can affect voters’ ambivalence. We focus in particular on the impact of negative language and character attacks on two distinctive aspects of ambivalence: the political affinity to more than one political party (partisan ambivalence) and the inconsistency among intra-area issue stances (attitudinal ambivalence). We run analyses on Module 5 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), merged with party-level data retrieved from NEGex 3.0. Our results show that the impact of negative language is twofold: it increases attitudinal ambivalence, but reduces partisan ambivalence. These findings show that parties’ communication does have a role in driving voters’ ambivalence, but its effects should be considered distinctively: on the one hand, negativity blurs issue discourse in voters’ mind; on the other hand, it helps clarify the partisan landscape.
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Gallina, M., Camatarri, S., & Nai, A. (2024). When Parties (Dis)Orientate Voters: The Effect of Negativity on Ambivalence. Annual Conference of the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), Seoul, South Korea. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/237293