Customer Reviews

Going Negative

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read this book about a year and a half ago, so some details are sketchy to me. But I wholehartedly disagree with the reviewer who thought this book was no good, and that it simply reflected the author's biases. However, I do agree that the author's proposed solutions are not as good as their informative and balanced account of negative campaign advertising.

While one might have alternative interpretations of the political survey data, and question the external validity of the author's controlled experiments, the authors do an excellent job of presenting the major issues in evaluating negative campaign advertising. I would highly reccommend this book to get a sense of the research being done about campaign advertising, and Ansolebehre and Iyengar are well-respected and clearly knowledgeable scholars. I won't get into all the specifics of the book; you should read it for yourself!

This book begins with an interesting thesis, which you can read about in detail in chapters 5 and 6. The authors claim that while political advertising in general has the effects of educating the public by informing voters about the candidates and the issues, negative ads can lead to decreased voter participation. Those who remain voters will tend to be more extreme in ideology and less representative of the general public. The concern in this book is that the rise in negative campaigns can subvert the democratic process.

Strangely, to get to their main point, you must wade through pretty dry chapters that discuss the methods used to gather data as well as other ways that advertisements affect voter behavior. This may be of great interest to political scientists, but for those with only partial interest, it is probably enough to read the first, fifth, and sixth chapters to get the main gist of the book.

An outstanding book for the political operative that explains, via social science and quantitative data, the appropriate use and likely effects of negative or comparative messaging.

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 there 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 why to improve the political process is the opposite of what the authors suggest, open up the system, allow the people more choices, not fewer.