News visibility is central to political success, shaping how citizens evaluate political actors. While previous research emphasizes institutional power as the main driver of media coverage, less is known about how elite personalities influence visibility across countries. This study combines personality profiles (Big Five and Dark Core) and media appearances of 159 candidates in 85 national elections across 52 countries (2016-2022). Stable politicians receive greater visibility overall, whereas dark traits-particularly narcissism and Machiavellianism-increase coverage in media systems emphasizing personalization and negativity. These findings reveal how media logic amplifies manipulative and antagonistic leaders, often linked to democratic backsliding.

The fracture between citizens and elites on European integration remains understudied, most notably when it comes to specific issues. One of these issues, particularly salient in the aftermath of Brexit, is holding further European Union exit referendums across the Union. While regularly floated by (Eurosceptic) parties for electoral purposes, it remains unclear to what extent parties and citizens agree to actually hold European Union exit referendums. We examine the relationship between party and citizen stances on this issue in 10 European Union member states, leveraging original cross-country survey data and expert survey data on parties' positions, both collected in 2019. The results show that parties tend to be more against holding a European Union exit referendum than their voters, less so the more extreme parties. Moreover, higher media saliency correlates with greater party-voter congruence, and the issue is more polarised among the electorate than at the party level.

Ideological cues can shape pop culture preferences - for instance, being told that a given artist is a liberal should normally increase likeability towards them amongs. In light of the increasing political advocacy role of entertainers across the globe, it is however surprising that little evidence exists about the reverse mechanism - that is, that learning about the political leaning of an artist that we appreciate affects our own political leaning. This research note presents novel experimental evidence suggesting that such mechanism might also be at play. We leverage the results of a novel experimental study conducted on a sample of American respondents in February 2024 (N = 1,821) in which we manipulated cues about the political leaning of two major pop stars, Taylor Swift and Kanye West, and assessed whether the saliency of such cues shapes musical and political preferences. Results provide preliminary support the idea that political cues can affect musical preferences, which is not surprising, but also that musical cues can in turn, under certain circumstances, affect political preferences and attitudes.

The polarized reaction to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO in December 2024 underscored the potential of ideologically framed acts of violence to undermine societal cohesion and challenge democratic norms. While many condemned the killing as an unjustifiable attack on a private citizen, others celebrated Mangione as a “folk hero,” glorifying him and his act as a symbol of resistance against an industry perceived as corrupt and dehumanizing. Using data from a rolling cross-sectional survey in the U.S., we causally tested partisan differences in support for political violence before and after the CEO’s assassination and the perpetrator’s subsequent arrest. While Democrats initially condemned violence against Republicans, their support for partisan violence increased following Mangione’s arrest. These results underscore the role of public discourse in shaping attitudes towards political violence, raising concerns about the normalization of politically motivated aggression, even among groups traditionally less inclined to endorse it.

Populists are known for their aggressive and uncompromising political style, and for rewarding a more combative behavior in their followers. Yet, virtually no evidence exists that aggressive populist rhetoric has an inciting effect among their followers towards greater support for political violence against political opponents. In this article, we present novel experimental evidence from four countries (Argentina, Czechia, Germany, Italy), assessing whether exposure to populist negative campaigning triggers greater support for political violence among their supporters. While we find only marginal evidence when looking at attacks in general, uncivil attacks from populists seem associated with a marginal uptick in support for violence among their followers - especially more severe forms of it (e.g., shooting political opponents). These results, while not excessively strong, shed a new light on the intersection between populism, aggressive rhetoric, and radical partisanship, and have possibly profound implications for a more comprehensive understanding of the roots of political violence in the public. All data and materials are openly available for replication.

The ‘directional’ definition of negative campaigning (i.e. when candidates leverage critiques against their political opponents) has been criticized for lacking reliability and validity. Does this critical assessment resist scrutiny? We propose, via nine different original studies, a full-scale reassessment of this critical assessment. Building on novel evidence from sources as disparate as expert ratings of elections across the world, automated and manual coding of social media posts, candidate self-ratings, cross-sectional surveys, experimental evidence, and more, we provide a much less pessimistic outlook. The evidence discussed in the nine studies showcases high levels of (self-)observer agreement (i.e. different people evaluate the same phenomenon similarly), situational consistency (evaluations are stable across time and space), convergent validity (different independent measures of the same phenomenon are strongly correlated), construct validity (measures can be used to provide empirical support for theoretically cogent hypotheses), and discriminant validity (proximate phenomena are perceived differently). The directional measure of campaign negativity is not perfect, but it is very much alive and kicking. The data and materials for all nine studies are open for replication and re-analysis.

Who is more likely to get "heated up" against their political rivals during the course of the campaign, as election day draws near? And for whom is such aggressive stance more likely to "cool down" in the aftermath of the election? Leveraging novel evidence from a four-wave longitudinal survey fielded in the weeks leading to - and the aftermath of - the Dutch national elections of November 2023 (N = 5500 in wave 1, N =1770 in wave 4), we test for the predictors of changes in negative radical partisanship (NRP) in voters. We measure NRP via four independent indicators - support for political violence, partisan Schadenfreude, moral disengagement, and social distance - and investigate the extent to which the psychological profile of respondents affects whether they "heat up" and "cool down" their radical stance during the course of the election. Results suggest that expressive partisanship and need for chaos highly relate to upsurges of negative radical partisanship in the build-up to elections, while at the same time hampering any post-election cooling down. The dark personality profile of respondents and populist attitudes seem to relate only marginally to (de)radicalization. Data and codes are openly available for replication.

Conversations with AI can sway people’s political views. Concerningly, a chatbot’s facts are not always accurate, especially when it supports right-wing positions. Conversations with AI can sway people’s political views. Concerningly, a chatbot’s facts are not always accurate, especially when it supports right-wing positions.

Growing evidence exists about the importance of dark personality traits - narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism - in political leaders, broadly leading to heightened political aggressiveness and partisan conflict. Building on this expanding research agenda, we study the possible association between dark personality in politicians and deepened affective polarization - that is, increased affective distance between partisan groups coupled with stronger dislike for out-parties - in the public. We do so by linking a large-scale expert survey (NEGex) and a collection of post-election surveys (CSES), including information for more than 90 leading candidates having competed in 40 elections worldwide. Our results show that the dark personality of top politicians can be associated with upticks in affective polarization in the public - but only when it comes to the personality of in-party candidates (that is, a candidate from voters' preferred party), and only for high levels of ideological proximity between the candidate and the voter.

As racial-ethnic and religious minorities have grown in Western societies, so too has the electoral success of nativist and far-right political parties. These parties commonly mobilize against Muslim minority groups, often targeting Islamic symbols such as mosques. This raises a key question: does the presence of mosques in local communities influence citizens’ vote choice? To answer this question, we analyze aggregate voting patterns in Swiss municipalities between 2007 and 2023. This includes data on voting returns from five elections and six anti-immigration popular initiatives. We augment these data with original spatial data that locates mosques in Switzerland, categorizing them as either a visible or non-visible feature of the built environment. Using coarsened exact matching (CEM), we estimate the causal effect of prominent, visible mosques on citizens’ voting patterns. Results indicate that a visible mosque in a municipality increases support for the far-right by approximately 3

This study analyzes the impact of aversive personality on the use of negative campaigning in televised debates. The study combines data from content analyses of the attack behavior of 19 unique candidates with 47 appearances in 30 German televised debates between 2005 and 2023 and expert ratings of an aversive personality in those candidates. The results show that candidates with higher ratings for a “dark” personality were significantly more likely to use attacks. Our findings suggest that personality influences aggressive communication by candidates even in such a highly regulated and highly visible format as a televised debate.

It is well known that voters’ evaluation of candidates on leadership traits influences their overall candidate assessment and vote choice (i.e., leader effects). It remains unclear, however, whether positive or negative leader trait evaluations are most influential. We argue that especially in current-day political reality—in which ideological and affective polarization are skyrocketing and the political climate is fueled with negativity, high levels of incivility, and negative campaigning—the negative leader effects outweigh the positive ones. Moreover, we expect this negativity bias in leader effects to be conditioned by partisanship and political dissatisfaction. To test these expectations, we triangulate multiple studies. First, we use data from a multi-country election survey to examine the relation between perceived leadership traits of real candidates and party preferences, providing observational evidence from the US, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Second, focusing on the causal mechanism, we test the negativity bias in a survey experiment among American voters. Here, we manipulate how leadership traits (competence, leadership, integrity, empathy) of a fictitious candidate are presented in terms of valence (positive, negative), and test the impact of these cues on voters’ candidate evaluations and vote choices. The findings indicate, as predicted, that negative leader effects influence voters most strongly. Thus, the role of party leaders is mainly a push instead of a pull factor in elections. Additionally, we show that partisanship and political dissatisfaction seem relevant only for candidate evaluations, not for vote choice. This article pushes the field of candidate evaluations forward by examining the dynamics of the negativity bias in leader effects in an era of negative politics.

Negative campaigning has become a prevalent campaign strategy not just in the U.S., but also in other established democracies. While negative campaigning has been a prominent focus of the academic literature, the state of knowledge is still mostly based on observational data, often artifacts of campaigning such as content analysis of press releases, campaign ads, or social media posts. Based on a pre-registered conjoint experiment embedded in surveys of more than 800 candidates running in German state elections, the paper aims to explain under what conditions candidates attack their opponents. Rational-choice considerations matter, as candidates are more likely to attack when they see a net gain in the strategy. However, the characteristics and behavior of the opponent also play an important role. Negative campaigning is more likely if the opponent is male, ideologically distant, and has attacked before. In contrast, the closeness of the race and the likelihood of retaliation have no influence on attack behavior. Furthermore, the decision to attack their opponent is largely independent of candidates' own incumbency status, gender, or personality. By integrating relevant factors that were identified in the literature in one research design, the paper sheds light on the drivers of campaign negativity and points towards the role of further situational factors that are shaping candidates' behavior on the campaign trail. Beyond negative campaigning, this study demonstrates the value of embedding experimental designs in samples of political elites.

We investigate whether a real-world episode of physical violence committed in October 2023 against Thierry Baudet, leader of the Dutch far-right FvD, conditioned a differential support for political violence among different voters: voters ideologically close to the target of the attack (in-group) and voters experiencing partisan Schadenfreude toward the party of the target (out-group). The unexpectedness of the attack makes it an excellent case of exogenous treatment in a natural experiment (“Unexpected Event during Survey Design). The fact that the attack occurred in the midst of a survey unfolding a rolling cross-section design yields likely more robust estimations than usually found in similar natural experiments. Our results indicate that the attack against Baudet slightly normalized political violence in the short term. While no specific uptick of support for violence was measured among respondents close to the FvD, in the short and medium term the attack furthermore slightly increased support for violence among respondents who dislike the FvD and experience partisan Schadenfreude.

Abstract This chapter dives deeper into the mechanisms of dark politics and asks a fundamental question: Are the effects of dark politics the same across all voters? Are some citizens more attuned—or responsive—to dark politics than others? The chapter makes use of new experimental evidence gathered in an online sample of American citizens. In the experiment, we exposed respondents to fictive candidates with manipulated personality traits and assessed whether such controlled exposure to dark politics is particularly “effective” for some voters and not others. We show strong evidence for this argument. Broadly speaking, the experimental evidence presented suggests that some individuals “like” dark politics. The chapter also includes an investigation of the driving role of populist attitudes in voters. Leveraging again the comparison between our NEGex data and the CSES data set, we show that populist voters, all things considered, like dark politicians.