CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Gilbreath, Dustin Robert |
|---|---|
| Title | Negative Campaigns and the Generation of Uncertainty and Ambivalence: Evidence from a Quasi-experiment and Lab Experiment Replication in the Republic of Georgia |
| Summary | Negative campaigns have been extensively studied over the last thirty years, which has led to a consensus in the literature – negative campaigns are inconsistently effective. This suggests that rather than lingering over the question of effectiveness, studies of negative campaigns should explore alternative hypotheses about their effects more broadly. Hence, rather than asking whether negative campaigns are effective campaigns, I ask, “what are the effects of negative campaigns?” Reformulating the question in this manner, I argue that two likely outcomes of a negative campaign are uncertainty and ambivalence based on the literature on political information processing, ambivalence, uncertainty, misinformation, and cognitive dissonance. Looking to the literature on third-person effects, I suggest these outcomes are possible at the individual as well as social level. Using a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design and lab experiment replication, I show that both uncertainty and ambivalence are possible results of a negative campaign. However, much as with the effectiveness hypothesis, these outcomes are inconsistent. This suggests the need for future research into when the content and context of messages are effective as the literature has already suggested, as well as when a negative campaign is ambivalence and/or uncertainty inducing as I suggest in this thesis. These debates aside, the thesis informs understandings of attacks against non-office seekers in general and public opinion pollsters specifically through exploring a negative campaign against the Caucasus Research Resource Centers – Georgia. By exploring a negative campaign in a competitive authoritarian regime, this thesis contributes to understandings of the dynamics of such regimes, concluding that negative campaigns in such contexts resemble negative campaigns elsewhere. |
| Supervisor | Littvay, Levente |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/gilbreath_dustin.pdf |
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