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Attacking Each Other, Attacking Europe: Negative Advertising in the 2019 European Election

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The 2019 European Electoral Campaign

Abstract

This chapter examines the use of negative campaigning and concludes that there is limited support for the view that this was a highly polarized and conflict-saturated election given only 14 per cent of all campaign messages were negative, a lower amount compared with the 2014 campaign. Results also indicate, in line with previous research, that fringe parties (particularly right-wing ones) are most likely to use negative appeals.

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Acknowledgements

Christina Holtz-Bacha would like to thank Tina Löffler, Eva Winkler and Yannick Hübsch (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg) for collecting and coding the research material and last not least Dennis Steffan and Niklas Venema (FU Berlin) as collaborators in the German part of the project.

Bengt Johansson would like to thank Linus Karlsson for coding the research material.

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Correspondence to Christina Holtz-Bacha .

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Holtz-Bacha, C., Johansson, B. (2022). Attacking Each Other, Attacking Europe: Negative Advertising in the 2019 European Election. In: Novelli, E., Johansson, B., Wring, D. (eds) The 2019 European Electoral Campaign. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98993-4_7

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