Attacking or self-promoting? The influence of tone of advertising and issue relevance on candidate evaluations and the likelihood of voting for an emerging challenger in Korea

This experimental study examines the effectiveness of attacking strategy for a challenger candidate, and the moderating role of issue relevance in negative political advertising. Results indicate that the effects of negative advertising on the sponsoring candidate's personal attributes depend on issue relevance. That is, participants gave the highest evaluations of the sponsoring candidate's personal attributes when exposed to positive advertising with low-relevance issues. When it comes to the sponsoring candidate's qualification attributes, participants were more likely to give higher evaluations when issue relevance was high regardless of the tone of the advertising. As would be expected, the emerging challenger encountered unintended consequences in terms of participants' likelihood of voting when employing negative advertising to attack the leading candidate. Participants exposed to negative ads were less likely to vote for the sponsoring candidate than those who were exposed to positive ads.