Customer Reviews

GOING NEGATIVE: How Political Ads Shrink and Polarize the Electorate

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Don't get me wrong, this book isn't going to have you captivated from cover to cover, but if you're looking for a good book to do a research project on in elections and voting behavior--this certainly is one of the most exciting choices around.

Going negative investigates the influence of negative political advertising on American voters. The book breaks old beliefs and describes a disturbing picture of what the future holds if negative ads do not change. Ground breaking and very interesting.

A few things jumped out at me when I first sat down to write this review. The first was that in reading the introduction and then as the book goes along, the reader starts to wonder if maybe there is not some underlying bias in the research. The authors are based in California, used a majority of California political contests and used as their control and test groups Californians. Not that there is anything wrong with the great state of California, it's just that it is known as a very liberal state and this book is supposed to be fair study of negative campaign adds and the effect on Joe average. I keep wondering why they did not focus on races in the mid west where the states swing from one side of the spectrum to the other depending on the year. If this was not enough of a concern about bias then the comments about how the GOP tends to be better at the attack add and they use it more often is another comment that looks bias. Even if it is true, and given I am a lefty I think it is, it does tend to look a little bias.

The next issue I had with the book was the fact that it is one of the dullest and driest book I think I have ever come across. These two guys are not authors, why the publisher did not get a ghost writer in there to pep up the text is beyond me. Ok I know that it is an "important study" type book, but man alive if it was not hard to read. Even when they were describing read meat attack adds they somehow found ways to dull it down to a written equitant to watching dust gather on a table. Page after page I was torn between wanting to keep going and wanting to break down in tears due to the pain of continuing. It is a statement to how interesting the overall topic is that I got through the book at all. Running a marathon, climbing Everest and reading this book are all about equitant in pain and effort.

That leads me to the last thing I want to say and that is that many parts of the book were interesting. Outside of the rather basic views on Democratic or Republican strong points, the authors were able to provide some interesting views on who is effected by negative adds. I had always thought the effect was to change people from one candidate to another, but the authors detail out evidence that all the negative adds do is reinforce the opinions of the partisan and turn off the middle of the road folks. The authors tried to tie in a correlation with declining participation in elections with the increase in TV advertising. The authors also surprised me by standing up for TV adds, negative or positive. They made the claim that most people gain their knowledge of candidates primarily from these adds so the volume of the adds helps in getting information out to the public.

Overall the book was useful and interesting in parts. It was just so badly written that the average reader is going to give up about 25 pages in. I wish the authors could have done a better job in the writing as the information contained in the book is eye opening if not a bit bias. The book is probably only for the political junkies of you.

Dry, poorly organized & repetitive, Going Negative is a big disappointment. Many of the authors contentions have been disproved by time, for example the authors suggest that certain issues belong to certain parties and cannot be co-opted by the other side, if this were true, how does one explain Clinton and W? The flaws in the research are fairly obvious, and it's obvious that the research was driven by the bias of the researchers. One telling line about the relative importance of issues talks about how Republicans are `concerned' about crime while Democrats `fear' losing civil rights. A surprisingly revealing use of loaded language. These establishment types have found, surprisingly, that we would be better off if we did what the parties told us to. In recommending the return of the smoke filled room, they ignore the real problems the country faces and the obvious solution. Indeed, the real way to improve the political process is the opposite of what the authors suggest, open up the system, allow the people more choices, not fewer.

I needed this book for a class and i hated "Going Negitive" so much i shot my teacher...No but, really, the book it boring and analytical. Overall, not a interesting read. Although, it is full of great information, it just happens to be common knowledge.