Over the last decades, the literature on negative campaigning has identified a series of factors leading political parties or candidates to go negative, focusing their messages on their opponents instead of on themselves. However, the extant literature has not fully explored the relevant difference between issue-based negativity (focused on the opponent’s position on a specific matter) and valence-based negativity (based on their negative general traits), as it almost always focuses on only one type of negativity, or on both but not distinguishing between them. In this article, using an innovative dataset of negative messages published in newspapers during 37 first-order election campaigns in ten European democracies, we aim at filling in this gap by shedding light on the relative frequency of valence- and issue-based negativity in campaigns, as well as by assessing to what extent their frequency is impacted by different election-, party- and timing-related variables.

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