2025/10/02 by Wiebke Drews, Jasmin Riedl, Johannes Steup · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Social Media and Politics #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Media Studies and Communication
paper · doi:10.1080/09644008.2025.2561584
This paper investigates how spatial party competition shapes topical negative campaigning during Germany's 2021 federal election. We define topical negative campaigning as attacks on opponents that target specific policy issues, and spatial pressure as a party's ideological proximity to all relevant competitors on a given issue dimension. We argue that in crowded ideological spaces-where parties hold similar positions on salient issues like the economy and the environment-negative campaigning increases as a strategic means of differentiation. When substance alone fails to create contrast, parties turn to negativity to stand out and sharpen their profile. Using 166,402 tweets from 1228 official party accounts, we examine negative campaigning across four issues: economy, ecology, culture, and COVID-19. Our method combines named entity recognition, stance detection (XLM-RoBERTa-XL), and a dictionary approach. We introduce a novel measure of spatial pressure that captures issue-specific proximity in a multiparty system. Our findings show that higher spatial pressure leads to more negativity on salient and contested issues (economy and ecology), but reduces it on lower-salience or depoliticised topics (culture and COVID-19). This demonstrates that the effect of ideological proximity is conditional on issue context and reveals negativity as a functional response to spatial crowding.