Negativity in Democratic Politics

Stuart N. Soroka is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He is currently a co-investigator of the Canadian Election Study and a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. Soroka's previous books are Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada (2003) and Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion, and Policy (coauthored with Christopher Wlezien, Cambridge University Press, 2010). Degrees of Democracy received the Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award from the Canadian Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. His research has also been published widely in such journals as the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, the American Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, and West European Politics. Soroka sits on the editorial boards of three journals – Political Communication; the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties; and the Canadian Journal of Political Science.

• 1. On negativity; 2. Negativity in politics; 3. (Political) impression formation; 4. Economic sentiment and government approval; 5. Media content; 6. Reactions to news content.

'Soroka has produced a masterly analysis of the impact of negativity, beginning with psychology, microeconomics and neuroscience, and then focusing on the field of politics. His tour de force ranges from evaluations of, and voting for, individual politicians, to government approval, media and news impact, and political institutions. In fascinating detail he then shows that all is not lost and draws out some positive consequences of this negativity bias, which may well be an effective way to manage democratic governance.' Miles Hewstone, University of Oxford