OTTAWA—It’s said that voters get the government they deserve.

But the recent wave of negative headlines about Canadian politicians — from troubled mayors to senators deep in scandal — may also be giving the public what it wants, according to a surprising new study about “consumer demand” for political news.

The study by Stuart Soroka and Marc Trussler of McGill University flies in the face of oft-stated arguments that people are turned off by political stories that are negative or focused solely on power strategies.

In fact, they found the opposite to be true.

“We find, in sum, that individuals tend to select negative and strategic news frames, even when other options are available, and, moreover, even when their own stated preferences are for news that is less negative and/or strategic,” Trussler and Soroka write in their report.

Though much research has been done on what people say they want in political news — more positive stories, more ideas, less strategy — the two political scientists decided to test whether there was any demand for more negative news.

So they set up an experiment, using 100 undergraduate students from a variety of programs at Montreal’s McGill University. The students were told that they were taking part in an “eye-tracking” test, to measure their reactions when they watched TV news. They were outfitted with fake eye-tracking equipment and told that before the experiment started, they were to review some news stories on a pre-prepared web page for three to nine minutes.

The web pages were carefully loaded with a balance of positive and negative political news stories, as well as articles primarily about policy, in addition to those strictly about political strategy.

“The focus on the eye-tracking here is just a ruse — what we are really interested in are the stories the participants select from the news webpage,” Trussler and Soroka write.

The findings were then sorted according to complex story rankings based on tone, topic and even taking into account where the articles appeared on the web pages.

What emerged through these complex calculations was a definite preference for negative political stories. Some of the headlines on the web pages included “Dirty political game gets dirtier,” and “Tories stung in e-privacy backlash.”

As well, the tests showed that the more the subjects knew about politics, the more inclined they were to read strategy stories — even though these would be the kind of people to say they preferred to read about policy.

The study was presented at this year’s annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association and will probably be part of a larger book that Soroka and some other professors are doing about negativity in politics. Some of the research actually includes measuring people’s physical reactions to positive and negative news stories.

In an interview, Soroka said he wouldn’t want this study to be seen as encouragement for all-out, negative political coverage.

“Clearly it’s neither desirable nor honest to provide only negative information just to generate audiences,” Soroka said.

However, he noted that these new Canadian findings are consistent with similar research in the United States and elsewhere, where political scientists have increasingly been probing negativity in politics as a case of supply meeting consumer demand.

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In their report, Trussler and Soroka also warn that there’s a difference between being negative and being flat-out cynical — portraying politics and politicians as thoroughly corrupt, for instance.

“Efforts on the part of journalists to produce a brand of journalism that is in line with their role as watchdogs might allow them to hold the attention of citizens, while also avoiding the corrosive effects of political cynicism,” they write.