As I read Stuart Soroka’s book on the role of negativity in politics for the first time I found myself stopping regularly to write down questions that the text stirred in my mind. It seemed as though on every page a new question would occur to me and I would need to pause to consider what this question implied about his argument or about possible future directions for research. This kind of reaction to a book is either a very good or a very bad sign. If the questions raised are in the vein of “Why did he do it that way?” or “Did she consider the possibility of X?” then a question on every page likely means an incoherent mess. On the other hand, if the questions are consistently of the flavor of “What’s next?” or “Could that argument be applied to X novel domain?” it is likely that the author is onto something exciting. I am happy to report that the questions raised by Negativity in Democratic Politics are very much of the latter type. Soroka makes important substantive contributions to a number of literatures within political science, but I suspect that the book’s greatest added value will be in inspiring research to follow the threads he has identified.

The subtitle of the book is “Causes and Consequences,” and Soroka organizes his arguments roughly along these two lines. Chapter 1 reviews research on negativity from a variety of fields, focusing on psychology, economics, neuroscience, and psychophysiology. The essential argument advanced by this review is that, despite superficial differences in conceptualization across these fields, the basic picture of negativity that emerges is quite consistent. Whether we are thinking in terms of impression formation (psychology) or loss aversion (economics), the song remains the same: Humans pay special attention, and give disproportionate weight to negative outcomes. From this wide-ranging review, Soroka suggests that this negativity bias is largely innate and rooted in evolutionary processes. Chapter 2 collects literature from a variety of domains in political science to make a similar point. Though it is rarely conceptualized in the terms of negativity bias, a robust body of evidence in political science points to negativity playing a key role in a variety of domains. Soroka adds to this literature with new evidence pertaining to the evaluation of political figures (Chapter 3), the impact of economic conditions on government evaluations (Chapter 4), and the prevalence of and reaction to negative news content (Chapters 5 and 6). Chapter 7 concludes by advancing the novel argument that political institutions demonstrate a negativity bias that closely parallels the psychological negativity bias of individuals. Soroka posits that human institutions naturally reflect the psychological processes of the people designing those institutions. In this way, the book flows from causes of negativity bias to its consequences as the focus expands from micro-level psychological processing to macro-level consideration of institutional design. Much of the strength of Soroka’s argument stems from this combination of breadth and depth of approach.

Evolutionary explanations are notoriously difficult to verify empirically, and Soroka wisely refrains from pushing the evolution story too hard. On the one hand, he makes the case for why organisms benefit from heightened sensitivity to negative stimuli, and consistently highlights the evidence in support of this understanding. Most of this empirical support takes the form of negativity bias consistently appearing across cultures. On the other hand, while Soroka clearly sees negativity bias as an innate human characteristic, he also acknowledges the circumstantial nature of the evidence. He settles on something of a pragmatic approach to the causes of negativity bias that posits evolution as the best explanation for the ubiquity of negativity largely by being the most plausible untested possibility. I appreciated the transparency of this approach, and found it largely persuasive. However, it should be noted that if you are not as swayed as I was, the volume has little to say about the causes of negativity bias. Soroka’s empirical chapters are much more focused on documenting the existence and consequences of negativity bias than in attempting to illuminate the sources of such bias.

It also bears mentioning that Soroka largely punts on the question of how negativity should be defined. He rightly points out early in the book (pp. 29–30) that this definitional ambiguity is common in research of this type. Negativity is usually treated as a “you know it when you see it” kind of concept. While I am sympathetic to this way of thinking, it does create situations where I am not clear what evidence would be sufficient to disprove the existence of negativity bias. If the exact definition of negativity is opaque, we can always move the goalposts wherever we need them to be in order to show the result we want. To be clear, I am in no way accusing Soroka of this kind of slippery thinking, but it did occur to me at times during his empirical chapters that I was not at all sure what a counterfactual world without negativity bias should look like. This is something future research must wrestle with, and the sooner the better.

I suspect that the most productive path to clarifying what negativity is will be to spend more effort defining what positivity is. Soroka’s entire story about the importance of negativity bias hinges on the existence of an equally prevalent positivity bias. Humans (the argument goes) need to be optimistic in their expectations in order to seize opportunities, and then sensitive to negative deviations from those expectations to avoid catastrophe. Soroka devotes his attentions to the second part of that, but the baseline positive orientation is equally crucial. I would have taken somewhat less evidence of negativity bias across varied domains, if it could have left room to explore the positive slant in what people expect in politics. Along similar lines, Soroka focuses in overwhelmingly on negativity bias in attention, but he spends less time considering other domains for negative perception. For example, what is the expectation for how people will interpret information that is ambiguous in its tone? When faced with shades of gray, do we expect people to see the worst or the best?

Even with these conceptual questions, Soroka’s empirical findings make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that negativity is an important force in how politics unfold. Over the course of the book, Soroka employs an impressive array of data to make his case. Several of these data sources are unique and compelling in their ability to illustrate both the supply of and demand for negativity. Chapter 5’s comparison of content analysis of local news coverage with a database of police reports in Bloomington, Illinois shows that “if it bleeds it leads” is more than a cynical aphorism. And Chapter 6 leverages newsstand sales data to show that this tendency towards negativity is largely driven by consumer demand. When these findings are combined with the more traditional survey-based analyses, Soroka’s case becomes very compelling. The questions he leaves you with are the best kind of questions for spurring future study. I expect that this book will be the launch pad for a huge amount of work ranging across subfields and theoretical orientations. And I cannot wait to read what comes next.