ArticleAuthors: Jonathan Sullivan; Eliyahu V. Sapir (2012)
Why do election candidates go negative? This question about one of the most distinct elements of campaign behaviour has vexed political scientists for many years. Many explanatory variables have been proffered, in isolation and in ad hoc combinations. But extreme variation in the predictive power of these variables across elections has confounded attempts to develop a general model for explaining campaign attack ads. Taking advantage of the increasing number of polities in which negative advertising has been observed, this article applies a series of explanatory models to explain negative advertising in national and subnational elections in Taiwan. The analysis replicates prior resear... 
