Are Political Attacks a Laughing Matter? Three Experiments on Political Humor and the Effectiveness of Negative Campaigning

Abstract

Research on the effectiveness of negative campaigning offers mixed results. Negative messages can sometimes work to depress candidate evaluations, but they can also backfire against the attacker. In this article, we examine how humor can help mitigate the unintended effects of negative campaigning using data from three experimental studies in the Netherlands and the USA. Our results show that (i) political attacks combined with “other-deprecatory humor” (i.e., jokes against the opponents) are less likely to backfire against the attacker, and can even increase positive evaluations of this latter - especially when the attack is perceived as amusing. At the same time (ii), and contrary to what we expected, humor does not take away the edge of the attack: funny attacks do not work less well against the target than non-funny attacks. All in all, these results suggest that humor can be a good frame for political attacks: it reduces harmful backlash effects against the attacker and they are just as effective as humorless attacks.