The 2006 presidential campaign in Mexico was especially nasty, with television ads claiming that AMLO was the second coming of Hugo Chávez and would destroy the country if elected. Mexico, however, lacks an equivalent of the First and Fourteenth amendments and, more importantly, the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of both. (Article 6 of the Mexican constitution guarantees freedom of speech, “unless it offends good morals, infringes the rights of others, incites to crime, or disturbs the public order.” Article 7 unconditionally guarantees the right to write and publish, but that is more specific than speech in general.)
The result of the election, then, was a 2007 law that prohibited negative campaigning. (Mr. López Obrador’s subsequent behavior, and whether that retroactively justified otherwise scurrilous ads, is not relevant to this discussion.) The result is an oddly anodyne bunch of ads. TV ads emphasize personality, as do the print ads from the three major parties. The PRI candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, is also running on the Green Party ticket, however, and is using that platform to run a bunch of rather interesting issue statements:
My favorite is “Life sentences for kidnappers,” but I didn’t get a picture. Above you have a subway ad proclaiming “Pensions for all adult over age 65” and “Your place guaranteed in high school.” The latter is pretty much already true, and the former will be interesting without new tax revenue.
Below you have “No to fees in the public schools,” with a picture of an angry white man scolding a woman who only wants the best for her child:
And a related billboard proclaiming “No more fees in public schools: Truly free education.”
The end result is oddly populist to an American, but honestly no worse than the populist positive ads run by Republicans all the time. So what’s the problem? Two things.
First, the internet is unregulated. This is, I think, less of an issue than it sounds. In general, the internet is not a push medium, except for paid adverts, which are (or will be) regulated. Whispering campaigns are of course terrible, but I would need evidence to be persuaded that they are worse in the age of the internet: e.g., that they convince anyone who wasn’t already basically on-board.
Second, negative ads can convey real information. Patrick Corcoran argues this here. It makes sense that the truly scurrilous stuff will not convince a sophisticated electorate regardless of how it is disseminated, while real bad information may find it harder to be known. That said, I am not sure how this shakes out.
What I am sure of, however, is that the Green Party has no reason to exist other than as a subsidy-collecting machine, and is very far from Green. But that is a different issue.
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