Negative Campaigning in a Non-Liberal Democracy

Abstract

Negativity has emerged as a defining feature of political campaigns across liberal democracies over the past two decades. The type of political system (presidential or parliamentary), the number of parties, and the nature of elections—such as presidential versus parliamentary or national versus local—shape the strategies, intensity, and forms of negative campaigning. Nevertheless, negativity remains a crucial campaign element across Western democracies. Grounded in the theory of negativity bias, which posits that negative information has a stronger psychological impact than positive messaging, politicians increasingly adopt negative strategies to engage voters, while media outlets amplify this negativity to attract audiences. Although numerous theories have been proposed on why and how campaign strategists use negativity (e.g., Harrington & Hess, 1996; Theilmann & Wilhite, 1998; Hansen & Pedersen, 2008; Mattes & Redlawsk, 2014; Trent et al., 2016), and how voters process such messages (e.g., Surlin & Gordon, 1977; Taber & Lodge, 2006; Redlawsk, 2006; Meffert et al., 2006; Mutz & Reeves, 2005), consensus on public responses remains elusive. This research gap is particularly pronounced in non-liberal democracies, where empirical studies on negativity are virtually non-existent. This study provides the first systematic examination of negative campaigning in Iran’s presidential elections, focusing on the 2021 and 2024 contests to generate empirical evidence from a non-liberal democracy. It addresses key research questions: How do patterns of negative campaigning differ in non-liberal democracies compared to Western contexts? How do institutional constraints shape negative messaging? And how do Iranian citizens process and respond to political negativity? Using a supply-and-demand framework, it examines both candidates’ strategic deployment of negative messages and public responses to such content. Data sources include (1) historical election data, (2) 2,665,084 tweets posted by 126,596 unique users during the 2021 election, and (3) over 7,200 tweets from politicians and 327,000 public interactions from both the 2021 and 2024 elections. Advanced data science techniques, including sentiment analysis, network analysis, and machine learning models specifically adapted for Persian political discourse, were employed alongside manual tweet coding for accuracy. The findings reveal distinctive patterns in Iran’s hybrid regime: government-affiliated targeting remained consistent across elections, demonstrating accountability mechanisms similar to Western systems but operating within system-defined boundaries. Factional solidarity patterns evolved strategically between elections, with principlist attacks showing stronger coordination in 2024. While negativity increased from 28% in 2021 to 39% in 2024, it primarily manifested through policy-focused criticism rather than personal attacks (4% in 2021, 6% in 2024). The boomerang effect—where negative messages trigger negative responses—intensified between elections, indicating strong normative sanctions against negativity. Network analysis revealed clear factional clustering in political discourse, with limited cross-community engagement, explaining why negative messaging primarily reinforced existing factional identities rather than persuading across boundaries. This research contributes a novel theoretical framework of “bounded contestation” for understanding how negative campaigning functions in hybrid regimes, where criticism operates within carefully calibrated parameters that permit meaningful differentiation between candidates while reinforcing rather than challenging fundamental system legitimacy. By comparing a normal election (2021) with an extraordinary election following President Raisi’s death (2024), the study distinguishes universal psychological mechanisms from contextually dependent patterns, extending theories of electoral authoritarianism by documenting how criticism simultaneously provides accountability mechanisms while reinforcing system stability. The findings bridge significant empirical, analytical, and methodological gaps in understanding negative campaigning beyond Western liberal democratic contexts.