This book is a plea for political scientists, the press and everyday people to voice less derogatory views about attack ads and negative campaigns more generally. Negative ads, the authors argue, play a useful role in American elections. The studies in this volume investigate previously unexplored aspects of what it is that the public objects to about so-called “negativity.”

I say “so-called” in this case because, as the authors explain, the way most scholars apparently have defined negativity has very little to do with negativity per se. This appellation does not necessarily reflect the tone of the advertisement nor of its topic. Instead, in many cases all ads in which a candidate talks about his or her opponent have been defined as “negative,” regardless of the content of the communication. So, for example, if Candidate A has an ad pointing out that Candidate B voted to raise taxes, this would be considered a “negative” ad because it includes information about the opponent instead of, or in addition to, information about the candidate who is being advocated. Not surprisingly, the authors demonstrate that the idea of talking about one’s opponent does not bother people nearly so much as being told that a candidate is running “negative” ads about another. The term “negative” is itself a cue that affects citizens, causing them to believe that politicians are behaving badly.

This finding has important implications for the role of the press in influencing how the American public experiences political campaigns. In short, the more the press whines about negativity, the more disdainful they make public reactions to the campaign. Although the press may perceive itself to be critical of negativity, the mere act of labeling campaigns as such makes the public perceive them to be even more so.

Further, the authors’ work also casts aspersions on the many political scientists who complain about negative advertising. Scholars’ content analyses and categorizations of ads often utilize a different definition from what everyday people colloquially think of as negativity. To the public, negativity usually refers to harsh and personal criticisms. By using a broader definition, political scientists further promote media coverage bemoaning excessively negative campaigns. In many cases, if the label was not applied, viewers would not notice. Because they do not view all claims made about opponents as negative, they would maintain a far more positive view of campaigns if labelling were avoided. For example, Mattes and Redlawsk find that talking about an opponent’s lack of experience or a specific policy stance is not seen as negative by the public, academic definitions notwithstanding.

People’s internalized definitions of what is negative depend heavily on the topic addressed. Personal attacks are more likely to be viewed as negative, especially if they target the candidate’s family. Ads that are viewed as deceptive or as ad hominem attacks are readily labelled as negative by citizens as well.

One of most important points the authors make is in Chapter 5 where they emphasize the informational value of negative ads, and the distinction between an ad’s truth value and its perceived negativity. Here the book overlaps to some extent with John Geer’s In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns (2006), where he argues that negative ads provide information that otherwise would not be available to citizens. But the further point made by Mattes and Redlawsk is that voters are not really so negative about negativity anyway.

Mattes and Redlawsk show that people are more skeptical about the truth value of negative campaigns, although voters do not automatically reject the information in negative ads. Perhaps because of their assumed power, negative ads receive more scrutiny than positive ones, both from voters and fact checkers. However, negative ads appear to be no less truthful than positive ads. So while it is important that people have accurate information, negative and positive ads are equally problematic in this regard.

The authors argue that evidence to date suggests that voters can tolerate negativity without ill effects. It is true that we have seen little convincing or consistent evidence of damage to democracy as a result of all this negativity, regardless of whether one looks to turnout or other forms of participation. Indeed, in this era of extreme competition for political audiences, it would probably not serve the public interest to make politics less negative. Negative ads are more engaging than positive ones, and they provide voters with information that is helpful. Even those who hate the prospect of Donald Trump as a major party nominee like to watch his ranting and raving, which is nothing if not entertaining and attention-grabbing. We are likely to lose those drawn in by this arousing content to HBO or Showtime if we insist that politicians make nice with one another.

There are several obvious parallels between The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning and my own recent book, In-Your-Face Politics. Just as people say they hate negative campaigning, they also claim to hate incivility in political discourse. But in reality there is little evidence that they are averse to the experience of watching either incivility or negative ads. In the case of incivility, they clearly indicate stronger intent to watch a television program again when it is uncivil. However, when asked survey questions about incivility or negativity, such questions have clear socially-desirable answers that favor the polite norms of human behavior. So while they typically voice dislike if not outright disdain, they cannot help but pay attention.

This is why the American contempt for negative campaigning persists alongside seemingly endless negativity. Likewise, uncivil discourse proliferates despite the fact that everyone claims to dislike it. Calls for greater civility by scholars, pundits, and the public are pro forma with each and every campaign. Yet there are no signs of decline and no real incentives for civility among the major political actors.

Further, political media have obvious reasons to promote both incivility and negative campaigning because they make for better stories than civility and positivity. While the commercial imperative is not necessarily a negative force—don’t we all want more people to pay attention to politics?—it does make journalists hypocritical when they simultaneously decry incivility and negativity as a bad thing, yet simultaneously promote it. Like the authors, I think it is probably time for journalists and the rest of us to simply accept it as part and parcel of healthy electoral competition.

Many generations have been raised on the notion that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you should not say anything at all. This admonition is obviously poorly suited to the world of partisan politics, if not the world more generally. Even so, our internalized sense of what is polite and appropriate in our interpersonal relations may still guide our sense of appropriate political discourse. The two situations—interpersonal interactions and political interactions—are not the same.

We routinely ignore the fact that campaigns are inherently competitive events. In other competitive events, such as basketball or football, we regularly tolerate professional athletes physically attacking and even drawing blood on one another because this is simply “part of the game.” If the same acts were committed on the streets outside our stadiums, they would be viewed as assault and the authorities would be called in. Context is everything.

Likewise, politicians have always attacked one another, in person or in print, if not on television. Even when watching such interactions causes us tension and discomfort, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. These highly-arousing ads may draw viewers’ attention and inform them, just as the authors argue.

The authors suggest that a strong preference for professional journalistic neutrality is the key reason that media cannot effectively play the watchdog role. While this may be a factor, I am skeptical that this is the main reason. When a media organization has exclusive dirt on a candidate, they are likely to use it regardless of whether it makes their coverage more favorable to one side. I suspect that limited personnel is a greater inhibitor. In today’s highly-competitive media environment, few (if any) reporters spend as much time digging up dirt on a candidate as that candidate’s opponent and his or her staff. Thus it is indeed helpful to allow candidates to police each other.

Nonetheless, the fact that politicians are regularly publicly shamed via negative ads may have some negative repercussions that receive little attention in a book oriented toward providing us with the positive case for negative campaigning. To revert once again to childhood norms, most of us do not particularly enjoy being called names. It takes a particular sort of person to stand up to the kind of public scrutiny and humiliation that candidates for office regularly endure.

We know that women win as often as men when they run for office, and that they are just as likely to accept appointed political positions as are men. But they are less willing to endure the rough and tumble of competitive election. I suspect that feeling respected is particularly important to those groups in society who have felt a lack of public respect in the past. Thus these under-represented groups may be less willing to endure the limelight that seems to cast disrespect on virtually everyone involved. Moreover, members of subordinate groups may be less comfortable attacking others. Likewise, many millennials watching partisan campaigns unfold may opt for less combative and controversial forms of political involvement.

Overall, I found myself wholeheartedly in agreement with the authors’ central argument and I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in the media and the nature of contemporary American political campaigns. Our relatively few points of disagreement were more in emphasis than substance. I continue to believe that there are some down sides to attack ads, though I concur that they are not the kinds of concerns most often voiced about negative campaigns.

At least initially, I had a difficult time understanding the decision to let respondents define whatever was “negative” in their own terms rather than providing a researcher-specified definition. Negativity, incivility, and untruthfulness may be conflated by the press and public, but they are not the same things. This distinction worked well for making the point about how what researchers call negative isn’t necessarily what the public would label as negative. But I was at times confused about which definition was intended when the word was used throughout the book.

I also wondered if this assessment of the impact of negative advertising was not overly cognitive in emphasis. There is an important difference between experiencing something in an aversive way and merely labeling something as “negative.” The authors use the similarity of findings between their experiments using descriptions of ads (Chapter 3) and results from showing people actual ads (Chapter 4) to make this claim. For some outcomes, it probably does not make a difference.

But asking people to evaluate text versions of ads strikes me as different from watching them. Likewise, asking if something makes a person angry is similar to asking if he or she disapproves of it; it does not require an emotional reaction. Talking about a candidate or campaign as being negative is different than experiencing that negativity in real time. Psychologists may agree on what is negative stimuli (dead babies) versus positive stimuli (flowers). But politics is a very different animal. At root, partisans often do not agree about what is a positive versus a negative, and what is or is not relevant to political judgment.

Like Mattes and Redlawsk, I think it would be a mistake to ban negative ads (by anyone’s definition) or incivility in campaign communications. Particularly given the intense competition for viewers, it would be a mistake to do so. But this does not mean that negative campaigning is wholly without its down side. The historical trend toward much stronger dislike for the political opposition (i.e., affective polarization) is real. In The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning, I was particularly struck by the quote from Samuel Johnson (p. 197): “Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.” Respect for the opposition is clearly in short supply these days, regardless of which side one is on. And while politicians have always been quick to point out one another’s faults, widespread public awareness of these attacks may not be without consequences. Perhaps what we citizens long for is to be able to view our leaders—even those we dislike and for whom we did not vote—from a respectful distance.