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An experiment was conducted to explore the effects of negative political advertising on several variables important to the political process. Results indicated that negative commercials may lead to greater candidate image discrimination and greater attitude polarization than their positive counterparts. Negative and positive commercials did not differ, however, in their effects on involvement in the election, communication behavior regarding the election, and likelihood of turning out to vote in the election.
Garramone et al. (1990) studied this question.