Allan Gregg is confused:
If negative advertising is so effective, maybe the media and politicians should ask themselves why other big advertisers (who are far more experienced and savvy) do not employ these same tactics. Just like the electoral process, it is safe to assume that McDonald’s wants to take market share from Burger King. They also know that the quickest and most immediate way of doing this would be to launch an ad campaign that claimed their competitor’s product contained botulism. Burger King could neutralize McDonald’s advantage by countering that Big Macs are rife with e-coli. This attack and counterattack might “work” to the extent that it would affect market share but it is not employed by McDonald’s and Burger King because they know it will destroy the category and pretty soon no one would ever buy a hamburger again. In other words, they are smart enough to know that the business they are in is not just about taking market share from the other guy … it’s about making consumers believe in eating hamburgers.
So while focusing on your opponent’s weakness rather than your own virtues might lead to a short term electoral advantage, over time, it will create a cascade of political cynicism. If you say “politician A is a crook” often enough, it is only a matter of time before the public comes to believe that all politicians are crooks. That is what is happening now and these are the seeds that defenders of negative advertising are sewing.
But Allan “oh, by the way, it was me who pushed for the infamous let’s-make-fun-of-Jean-Chretien’s-palsy advertisements in the 1993 campaign which bombed horribly” Gregg is completely skipping past the point, which is that creating political cynicism is not a cost of negative advertising; it is a benefit, because reducing the amount of politically engaged citizens makes elections easier to predict and manipulate. McDonald’s doesn’t do vicious negative advertising because if they taint the process of eating a hamburger they lose money; the Tories do negative advertising because if they taint the electoral process they effectively save money, to say nothing of making it easier to gain or maintain power.
This is really staggeringly obvious.
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you only want to disengage your opponents base, though
The bigger reason to not go negative in business is slander and libel suits. I imagine politicians could sue also, but they may worry about their opponents attacks being found truthful enough not to count.
When you are a party that cannot get a majority of the vote, you want the electorate to be smaller.
Yeah, the hamburger metaphor fails rather spectacularly. If I conclude that all fast-food burgers are full of disease, I can go eat something else.
But if I conclude all politicians are crooks, I can’t decide to vote for my favourite barista for MP. I either vote for the “least crooked” or don’t vote.
The really long term consequence of sowing the “all politicians are crooks” seed is rioting mobs and firing squads. But that is far enough down the line that politicians don’t think about it or assume it won’t be them against the wall.
My understanding is that no political party in Canada can get a majority of the vote as things stand now, and in fact that it has only ever rarely been the case in the past that one could. Would it not then follow that all Canadian political parties would want to be relentlessly negative, not just the tories?
Plus, stating that Burger King has botulism leads to long, expensive lawsuits.
Mischaracterizing your political opponent, at least under American laws, is a lot easier to get away with.
So, the Conservatives are releasing attack ads about Trudeau, and the Liberals are avoiding responding with negative ads thus far, right? If that’s the case, I think I found the Conservatives’ overall plan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP4yX2rkpBc
This is beside the point, but I can’t stop being amused at the mental images I get every time someone misspells the word “sowing” in the context of sowing seeds.
The court system also isn’t empowered to award votes, just money. So as long as you can get away with lying until the election, you’re golden.
We have a majority government now, and we had them all the time when I was growing up. But before our current government we had a whole string of minority ones.
Some people have been complaining that it will be very hard to create a left-of-centre majority government though, so long as we have two major leftist parties (Liberals/NDP). (I am one of those people)
I think Murc was talking about plurality of votes, not plurality of seats.
I don’t think it’s staggeringly obvious, inasmuch as I thought on reading this that you had made a good and surprising point.
I think the hamburger / politics analogy falls down because hamburgers are simple and material while policy / political ideology is complex and ethereal.