[The Editors' Verdict] The Truth and Falsehoods of Negative Election Campaigns

Not long ago, I supervised a doctoral dissertation titled “A Study on the Usefulness of Negative Election Campaigns.” While negative election campaigns are sometimes unavoidable, the conclusion was that negative campaigning has not been particularly effective in South Korean presidential elections.

Negative election campaigns fundamentally aim at winning elections. Moreover, they are easily adopted because they are much more efficient than positive election campaigns, which consume more time, goods, and services in physical terms. Although negative campaigns can sometimes help secure victory, they are very detrimental to national and social development. Especially after elections, when the country’s top leaders are left with hatred and retribution instead of policies and visions, the political and social damage is immeasurable.

In the United States, negative election campaigns are legally protected because the content of political advertisements and the identity and intentions of advertisers are recognized without limit. A representative example of negative campaigning in the U.S. was the 1988 41st presidential election, where Democratic front-runner Michael Dukakis was leading Republican candidate George H. W. Bush by nearly 20%, but unexpectedly suffered a crushing defeat due to negative campaigns such as the “Willie Horton” incident. The aftermath of this negative campaign included the worst voter turnout at 50.5% and negatively affected the economic difficulties during the four-year Bush administration.

Dukakis’s passive response to the negative campaign essentially handed victory to Bush, but Bush’s win was a hollow glory. For a president to leave a good legacy, the election process should naturally involve persuading voters with one’s policies. However, Bush obsessed over negative campaigning and, as a result, failed to mention his policies or address important national issues.

Sangcheol Park, Professor at the Graduate School of Political Studies, Kyonggi University

The American newspaper The Washington Post traditionally endorsed a specific candidate near the end of presidential elections, but this convention was broken in 1988. In an editorial, the paper described the election, which was dominated by personal attacks without clear policy proposals, as “horrific” and a “national disappointment,” stating that it could not find the trust and responsibility necessary to endorse any candidate and thus could not recommend anyone to voters. The unprecedented negative campaigning in the 1988 U.S. presidential election, characterized by a lack of policy and debate, ultimately became a root cause of economic difficulties in the U.S., and the public did not give Bush a chance for re-election.

Negative election strategies have not worked well in past South Korean presidential elections. In the 17th presidential election, then-ruling party candidate Jeong Dong-young seemed to believe that the BBK stock manipulation scandal alone could sink Lee Myung-bak, the Grand National Party candidate. Lee Myung-bak’s 747 pledge and the construction of the Korean Peninsula Grand Canal, which lacked sophistication and a sense of the times, won without presenting a proper agenda or vision. The election of the 16th president should be seen as a result of leading the election agenda with the highly controversial administrative capital relocation rather than the negative campaign strategy targeting candidate Lee Hoi-chang’s son’s military service scandal.

In recent South Korean presidential elections, negative campaigns have mainly focused on negatively portraying opposing candidates’ images. Especially since the public tends to emphasize morality as a basic requirement for public officials, damaging the moral character of competing candidates has become a key target of negative campaigns. However, South Korea’s five-year single-term presidential elections are more about prospective voting?choosing future vision and capable leaders?rather than retrospective voting that judges the past, so negative campaigns do not serve as a guaranteed winning strategy. What is clear is that the candidate who creates the agenda and demonstrates the vision and ability to govern will become the 20th president in the 2022 election, and no research has yet found a definitive correlation between negative election campaigns and election victories in South Korea.