When Primary Campaigns Go Negative: The Determinants of Campaign Negativity

Standard investigations of both campaign negativity and primary elections focus on either the electoral institutions or the primary voters. In this article, we begin to explore the factors affecting the content of the information environment voters face by examining the effects of timing and electoral context on which primary races are likely to become negative and when. Using a content analysis of newspaper coverage of every contested Senate primary in 1998, and binary time-series cross-sectional methods, we demonstrate that negativity is an interdependent function of the timing of the race, the status of the Senate seat, and the number and quality of the challengers in the primary.