Negative and Personalized Campaign Rhetoric: Party Communication and Media Coverage of Danish Parliamentary Elections 1994–2011

Abstract

Abstract The Danish 2011 national election campaign was allegedly characterized by the toughest political rhetoric ever in contemporary Danish politics. The political parties and the candidates apparently decided to “go negative” to a greater extent than usually. But was the 2011 campaign rhetoric actually the most negative in modern history? We seek the answer by means of quantitative content analysis of parties’ newspaper ads, party leaders’ letters to the editor and statements in party leader debates. We first compare the 2011 campaign with the five preceding campaigns and conclude that it was indeed the least negative of them all. We then compare the parties’ communication and the media coverage of the campaign to discover that the media strongly – and increasingly – emphasize the parties’ negative campaign messages relative to the positive messages. In sum: Danish parties were not especially prone to engage in negative campaigning in the 2011 election, but the media made the parties look more negative than in earlier campaigns.