One of most negative campaigns in history may have taken place during the 2014 Senate election cycle. Nearly 75% of senate ads aired during a two-week period in early fall of 2014 showed a candidate in a negative light, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. A postelection analysis by the Center for Public Integrity showed that 46% of the more than one million ads aired during the 2014 senate campaigns were negative. And, in the most competitive states, the proportion of negative ads was even higher (e.g., 67% in North Carolina, 58% in Kansas). Negative advertisements sponsored by candidates, interest groups, and political parties are being launched on the airways, in newspapers, on radio, and via the Internet at an unprecedented pace. These advertisements, however, are now routinely subjected to fact checking. The Washington Post, along with many other fact-checking organizations, such as PolitiFact, The AP Factcheck, and Factcheck.org, examine thousands of statements and political advertisements during campaigns to determine the accuracy of the claims. For instance, during the 2012 election cycle, PolitiFact had 36 reporters and editors working in 11 states producing more than 800 fact checks on the presidential campaign and hundreds more for candidates running for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.

In this article, we rely on data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) to examine the impact of gender for U.S. senators running for reelection. We propose a theoretical explanation for why an incumbent's gender may influence how citizens evaluate senators, and we present empirical evidence showing that people develop distinct impressions of men and women senators during campaigns. In the 2006 election cycle, women senators were viewed more positively than their male counterparts. Some of the advantages women senators enjoyed were consistent with established gender stereotypes. In particular, women senators were viewed as more honest and more caring than male senators. Moreover, women senators were viewed as more competent at dealing with health-care issues. However, we did not find evidence for gender stereotypes that traditionally produce more positive views of male senators. For example, we did not find that male senators were viewed as stronger leaders or more experienced than women senators. People did not view male senators as better able to deal with economic issues.

In the United States, research suggests that men and women candidates are covered differently by the press. However, few studies compare press coverage of candidates cross-nationally. Systematic comparison of newspaper coverage of male and female candidates during election campaigns in Australia, Canada, and the United States may help illuminate the conditions that exacerbate or dampen gender differences in candidate portrayals. Given the sharp focus on candidates in American campaigns and the relatively lower percentage of women in the Congress, we expect to find the greatest disparities in men's and women's press coverage in the United States. Our findings suggest that across these three democracies, candidates are often portrayed in terms of long-standing gender stereotypes. These gender differences have important implications for voters' perceptions of candidates and may shape widely shared attitudes toward women's role in the political arena.

Robert Jackson and Jason Sides (2005) conclude in their article, Revisiting the Influence of Campaign Tone on Turnout in Senate Elections, “We are hard-pressed to conclude that respondents' political profiles condition the influence of campaign tone on their turnout behavior.… Kahn and Kenney's conclusions about differential citizen responsiveness to campaign negativity should not become part of accepted wisdom in this area of scholarship.” We disagree and our reasoning rests on three points: the measurement and operationalization of a key variable: mudslinging; the selection of an appropriate estimation strategy; and the employment of theoretical expectations to make sense of the central findings.

VideoStyle, WebStyle, NewsStyle: Gender and Candidate Communication. By Dianne G. Bystrom, Mary Christine Banwart, Lynda Lee Kaid, and Terra A. Robertson. New York: Routledge. 2004. 240 pp. $23.95.

In their ambitious and timely book, Dianne Bystrom and her colleagues seek to answer the following question: Why are women still so underrepresented among political officials? The authors design an impressive study to examine whether gender differences in campaigning style influence voters' reactions to candidates.

One of the essential elements of an impartial press in the United States is the “wall of separation” between the editorial pages and the pages devoted to the news. While the political beliefs of newspaper owners and editors are clearly articulated on opinion pages, their views are not supposed to infiltrate the reporting of the news. The analyses presented in this paper raise questions about this claim. We examine newspaper coverage of more than 60 Senatorial campaigns across three election years and find that information on news pages is slanted in favor of the candidate endorsed on the newspaper's editorial page. We find that the coverage of incumbent Senators is most affected by the newspaper's endorsement decision. We explore the consequences of “slanted” news coverage by showing that voters evaluate endorsed candidates more favorably than candidates who fail to secure an editorial endorsement. The impact of the endorsement decision on voters' evaluations is most powerful in races receiving a great deal of press attention and among citizens who read their local newspaper on a daily basis.

Does negative campaigning influence the likelihood of voting in elections? Our study of U.S. Senate campaigns indicates the answer is “yes.” We find that people distinguish between useful negative information presented in an appropriate manner and irrelevant and harsh mudslinging. As the proportion of legitimate criticisms increases in campaigns, citizens become more likely to cast ballots. When campaigns degenerate into unsubstantiated and shrill attacks, voters tend to stay home. Finally, we find that individuals vary in their sensitivity to the tenor of campaigns. In particular, the tone is more consequential for independents, for those with less interest in politics, and for those with less knowledge about politics.