Matthew Yglesias raises an interesting point “in a recent post”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/04/multi-party-systems-and-attack-ads/ on an attack ad from the current Canadian parliamentary election campaign:
bq. The interesting thing is that in a multi-party system it’s difficult for the party behind an attack ad like this to reap all the benefits. This makes Ignatieff and the Liberals look terrible, but depending on your ex ante political preferences thinking worse of Ignatieff could turn you into a voter for the separatist Bloc Québécois or the social democratic NDP rather than the center-right Conservatives.
This got me wondering whether anyone had conducted research on the topic. A quick search of Google Scholar revealed a lot of studies of attack ads in US Senate elections, but I couldn’t find anything on attack ads outside of the United States. If you’ve written on this topic (or know someone who has), please let us know by posting in the comments section below. Also, feel free to let me know directly if you’d like to do a guest post for The Monkey Cage responding to the Yglesias post based on your research.