Alessandro Nai

Why “Going Negative?” Strategic and Situational Determinants of Personal Attacks in Swiss Direct Democratic Votes

While negative campaigning has received increased attention, scholars have mostly focused on its effects. Studies looking at the determinants of negative campaigning remain sparse. Our article contributes to literature by developing a two-level model that takes into account the strategic choices of political actors and their characteristics as well as the context in which the negative strategy takes place. We apply our model to a rich data set of newspaper ads regarding direct democratic votes held in Switzerland. Our results show that negative campaigning, as measured by personal attacks, is more likely if political actors defend the status quo or are lagging behind in the polls, if the ad stems from a populist right party or entails no explicit endorsement, or if the ballot day draws near. Popular initiatives and more intense campaigns also generate a higher share of negative campaigning. Overall, then, a number of causal factors identified in (U.S.) elections also matter in Swiss direct democracy, which suggests that the reasons that make political actors willing to “go negative” are of broad relevance.

Why Are Social Movement Organizations Deliberative? Structural and Cultural Determinants of Internal Decision Making in the Global Justice Movement

Decision making in social movements, and democratic visions and practices more generally, vary strongly from one movement organization to another. This chapter looks at possible explanations of such differences in internal decision making observed among organizations of the Global Justice Movement. Indeed, the adoption of a given democratic model varies a great deal across the organizations included in the study (Table 5.1). Based on information derived from the organizations’ online and offline documents, as well as a structured questionnaire submitted to them, the last column of this table shows that the associational model is the most common, followed by the two deliberative models and, lagging far behind, the assembleary model. Thus, half of the organizations put forward deliberation as their decision-making mode; about one-quarter of them follow the deliberative participative model.