Going Negative: How Political Ads Shrink and Polarize the Electorate

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.

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!

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.