Negative campaigns, interpersonal trust, and prosocial behavior: The mediating effect of democratic experience

Previous studies of negative election campaigns have not addressed the possible effects of campaign environments on interpersonal trust and prosocial behavior between voters. We provide the first evidence of these effects through an incentivized lab experiment conducted among student subjects in Egypt in 2014 and in the United States in between 2016 and 2018. This comparison allows us to tease out the mediating effect of subjects’ prior...