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Research on negative campaigning has grown rapidly in the past decades. This article reviews the literature dealing with this campaign strategy. It discusses its definition and measurement and stresses the mismatch between the academic literature and general perceptions. It then reviews why parties and candidates choose to ‘go negative’ with a particular focus on the rationales for negative campaigning under multi-party competition. The manuscript further discusses the literature on electoral effects and broader societal consequences of negative campaigning and emphasizes issues related to data collection and research designs. The conclusion summarizes the state of the art and outlines avenues for future research.

This study investigates to what extent affective polarization, and more specifically hostility towards opposing party supporters, finds its roots in ideological differences. We look into the way out-groups are constructed when there are more than two political parties, and at the role of ideology in this process. Hereby we position ourselves in the discussion between those who argue that affective polarization finds its root more strongly in group attachments vs. those who argue that it is mostly rooted in ideological differences. We conduct our study in the context of the highly fragmented multi-party system of Belgium which enables us to analytically disentangle party label cues from ideological distance. Our findings demonstrate that affective polarization is largely rooted in ideological differences between party electorates in Belgium. Additionally, we find that this particularly holds for citizens who are more ideologically invested, namely those with higher political interest and more extreme ideological views.

Pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) may increase parties’ chances of winning an election, but they may also distort electoral results and policies away from citizens’ preferences. To shed light on how PECs shape post-electoral power distribution, we study the causes and consequences of PECs in Finland where elections use an open-list proportional representation system, and parties may form joint lists. We present descriptive evidence showing that PECs are more common between parties of equal size and similar ideology, and when elections are more disproportional or involve more parties. Using difference-in-differences and density discontinuity designs, we illustrate that voters punish coalescing parties and target personal votes strategically within the coalitions, and that PECs are formed with the particular purpose of influencing the distribution of power. PECs increase small parties’ chances of acquiring leadership positions, lead to more dispersed seat distributions, and sometimes prevent absolute majorities. They can thus enable a broader representation of citizens’ policy preferences.

Pradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman rely on historical data spanning back to the eighteenth century from Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States to revise our understanding of why a country's party system consists of national or regional parties. They demonstrate that the party systems in these four countries have been shaped by the authority granted to different levels of government. Departing from the conventional focus on social divisions or electoral rules in determining whether a party system will consist of national or regional parties, they argue instead that national party systems emerge when economic and political power resides with the national government. Regional parties thrive when authority in a nation-state rests with provincial or state governments. The success of political parties therefore depends on which level of government voters credit for policy outcomes. National political parties win votes during periods when political and economic authority rests with the national government, and lose votes to regional and provincial parties when political or economic authority gravitates to lower levels of government. This is the first book to establish a link between federalism and the formation of national or regional party systems in a comparative context. It places contemporary party politics in the four examined countries in historical and comparative perspectives, and provides a compelling account of long-term changes in these countries. For example, the authors discover a surprising level of voting for minor parties in the United States before the 1930s. This calls into question the widespread notion that the United States has always had a two-party system. In fact, only recently has the two-party system become predominant.

This research note presents the RepResent Belgian Panel (RBP). The RBP is a voter panel survey consisting of four waves fielded to a sample of voters in Belgium around the May 2019 federal, regional, and European elections in Belgium. It provides unique data on about 250 variables for a quota sample of the same respondents, pre-2019 elections (N = 7351), post-2019 elections (N = 3909), one year after the elections (N = 1996), and 2 years after the elections (N = 1119). The RBP panel dataset was designed to analyse voters’ political attitudes and behaviours, notably on different dimensions of democratic representation, and with a specific focus on democratic resentment (e.g. citizens’ attitudes towards democracy such as distrust and alienation, but also behaviours such as abstention, protest, or voting for anti-establishment parties). Its longitudinal structure allows to explore the political dynamics at play in Belgium throughout the lengthy government formation process. Finally, the last two waves of the RBP were fielded during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing to explore public opinion before and during this global crisis. The RBP should be of interest to scholars of public opinion and electoral studies.

While positive party identification is one of the most used concepts in election studies, negative partisanship (NPID) is rarely analyzed. Evidence from two-party systems or settings with majority voting shows that hostility towards one of the other parties has its own unique impact on voting behavior. However, this effect has not been analyzed in the context of European multi-party systems with proportional voting. In this paper, I utilize data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, Module 3, which demonstrates that negative partisanship has its own positive effect on turnout (about nine percentage points). In addition, negative partisanship affects vote choice by 2–6 percentage points. However, contrary to previous findings, NPID does not always affect voting for one of the other parties; no significant relationship was found between NPID and vote choice for Conservative/Christian Democratic and Liberal parties. The results of this study add to the growing literature on negative partisanship and demonstrate its importance in the analysis of voting behavior in multi-party systems.

Does political ambivalence increase vote switching? While the effects of ambivalence on vote switching have been investigated in the American political system, its application to multi-party systems has not been explored. To address this gap, this article investigates the effects of ambivalence on vote intention switching and vote switching in Germany's multi-party system, which has recently experienced electoral instability. Using the German Longitudinal Election Study ( gles ), the article teases out the mechanics of party ambivalence, leader ambivalence, and party-leader ambivalence. The results suggest that ambivalence increases the probability of voters switching parties during the pre-election campaigning period and between two consecutive elections. Ambivalence therefore has important implications for vote switching and for understanding the underlying determinants of electoral volatility in twenty-first-century politics.

In recent years the American public has witnessed several hard-fought battles over nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. In these heated confirmation fights, candidates' legal and political philosophies have been subject to intense scrutiny and debate.Citizens, Courts, and Confirmationsexamines one such fight--over the nomination of Samuel Alito--to discover how and why people formed opinions about the nominee, and to determine how the confirmation process shaped perceptions of the Supreme Court's legitimacy. Drawing on a nationally representative survey, James Gibson and Gregory Caldeira use the Alito confirmation fight as a window into public attitudes about the nation's highest court. They find that Americans know far more about the Supreme Court than many realize, that the Court enjoys a great deal of legitimacy among the American people, that attitudes toward the Court as an institution generally do not suffer from partisan or ideological polarization, and that public knowledge enhances the legitimacy accorded the Court. Yet the authors demonstrate that partisan and ideological infighting that treats the Court as just another political institution undermines the considerable public support the institution currently enjoys, and that politicized confirmation battles pose a grave threat to the basic legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

Purpose Multi-party systems (MPS) comprise interdependent stakeholders (teams, organizations) that engage in complex interactions and negotiations. Building on the approach/inhibition theory of power, the self-enhancement strategy and on social interdependence theory, this study aims to understand the mediating role of attributions (i.e. perception of who/what is responsible for a certain outcome) in the relation between perceptions of the stakeholders’ power (i.e. self-perceptions of power, power ascribed to others and others’ perception of one’s own power) and their perceptions of intergroup climate and future collaborative intentions. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from 30 groups (113 participants) that took part in five multi-party simulations concerning the negotiation of funds allocation among six stakeholders. The authors have evaluated attributions, intergroup climate and future collaborative intentions using questionnaires and different facets of systemic power were derived from a round-robin procedure. Findings Mixed models and multi-level mediation analyses were carried out, and the results show that self-attributed power and power attributed by others predict internal attributions, while power attributed to others predicts external attributions. Moreover, attributions mediate the relationship between perceived power and future collaborative intention, as well as between power and perceptions of intergroup climate. Practical implications Managing the multi-party systems is a complex endeavor, and the results point toward ways in which power dynamics in multi-party systems can be addressed. Originality/value To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first empirical attempts to explore the association between the perceptions of power and attributions in multi-party systems engaged in negotiation tasks.

This paper presents two innovative approaches: a synchronous multi-party dialogue system that engages in simultaneous interactions with multiple users, and multi-group simulations involving virtual user groups to evaluate the resilience of this system. Unlike most other chatbots that communicate with each user independently, our system facilitates information gathering from multiple users and executes 17 administrative tasks for group requests adeptly by leveraging a state machine-based framework for complete control over dialogue flow and a large language model (LLM) for robust context understanding. Assessing such a unique dialogue system poses challenges, as it requires many groups of users to interact with the system concurrently for an extended duration. To address this, we simulate various virtual groups using an LLM, each comprising 10–30 users who may belong to multiple groups, in order to evaluate the efficacy of our system; each user is assigned a persona and allowed to interact freely without scripts. As a result, our system shows average success rates of 87% for task completion and 89% for natural language understanding. Comparatively, our virtual simulation, which has an average success rate of 80%, is juxtaposed with a group of 15 human users, depicting similar task diversity and error trends. To our knowledge, it is the first work to show the LLM’s potential in both task execution and the simulation of a synchronous dialogue system to fully automate administrative tasks.