Routledge International Handbook on Electoral Debates

Julio Juárez-Gámiz, Christina Holtz-Bacha, Alan Schroeder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367355036
• eBook ISBN: 9781000063912
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This Handbook is the first major work to comprehensively map state-of-the-art scholarship on electoral debates in comparative perspective. Leading scholars and practitioners from around the world introduce a core theoretical and conceptual framework to understand this phenomenon and point to promising directions for new research on the evolution of electoral debates and the practical considerations that different country-level experiences can offer.

Three indicators to help analyze electoral debates inform this Handbook: the level of experience of each country in the realization of electoral debates; geopolitical characteristics linked to political influence; and democratic stability and electoral competitiveness. Chapters with examples from the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Asia and Oceania add richness to the volume. Each chapter:

• Traces local historical, constitutive relationships between traditional forms of electoral debates and contexts of their emergence;
• Compares and critiques different perspectives regarding the function of debates on democracy;
• Probes, discusses and evaluates recent and emergent theoretical resources related to campaign debates in light of a particular local experience;
• Explores and assesses new or neglected local approaches to electoral debates in a changing media landscape where television is no longer the dominant form of political communication;
• Provides a prospective analysis regarding the future challengers for electoral debates.

The Routledge International Handbook on Electoral Debates will set the agenda for scholarship on the political communication for years to come.

1

INTRODUCTION

Televised Election Debates as Spectacle and Reflection

Stephen Coleman

Are televised election debates thrilling spectacles designed to simplify political choices for mass electorates or opportunities for citizens to engage in the hard work of individual and collective democratic reflection? Can they be both? What sort of normative criteria should be adopted in the appraisal of debates? Or should such evaluative criteria be pragmatic, eschewing lofty normativity? Much has been written about televised election debates over the past 80 years, usually as if their purpose is blindingly obvious. The objective of this chapter is to take a step back and ask what televised election debates are for. What part do they play in the messy improvisation of democratic culture? And how might we imagine them differently?

Most studies of televised election debates ignore these broad questions and focus on the simpler matter of who wins and who loses. Evidence is offered to show that debates have independent effects upon politically undecided citizens; upon voters with a weak allegiance to one party or candidate; upon viewers’ assessment of the character strengths and weaknesses of candidates, especially when the latter have had minimal media exposure before the debates; and upon close electoral races in which a relatively small number of votes might make a difference to the result (Katz and Feldman, 1962; Becker and Kraus, 1978; Chaffee and Choe, 1980; Geer, 1998; Blum-Kulka and Liebes, 2000; Pfau, 2002; Maier, Rittberger, and Faas, 2016; Baboš and Világi, 2018). While it is difficult to think of more than one or two quite exceptional examples of a televised leaders’ debate determining an election outcome, it would be unwise to conclude that debates merely reinforce preexisting preferences. In addition to these “political effects” studies, some scholars have focused upon what we might call “civic effects”. The latter focus upon the extent to which debate viewers are stimulated to take a greater interest in, or engage with, election campaigns. For example, Wald and Lupfer, (1978) famously wrote about “the presidential debate as a civics lesson”. In such a context, viewers were imagined as students of democracy, honing their civic skills with a view to becoming “better” voters. Televised election debates have been said to stimulate citizens to seek out additional information, talk to others about problems, policies and ideas raised within them, and experience an enhanced sense of confidence in their own political knowledge and capacity to engage in political action (McLeod, Bybee, and Durall, 1979; Lemert, 1993; Zhu, Milavsky, and Biswas, 1994; Benoit, Webber, and Berman, 1998; Jamieson and Adasiewicz, 2000; Weaver and Drew, 2001; Benoit and Hansen, 2004; McKinney and Chattopadhyay, 2007; McKinney and Rill, 2009; Cho and Choy, 2011; McKinney, Mitchell, Rill, and Thorson, 2013; Turcotte and Goidel, 2014; Van der Meer, Walter, and Aelst, 2016).

These functional studies were produced in the belief that everyone knew what televised election debates were for. It was assumed that these events would serve as edifying stimuli, generating positive effects that could only be advantageous to the health of democracy. Determining such effects would be a purely empirical matter. Problems begin to arise when there is disagreement about what constitutes a healthy democracy. Is it the role of democratic media to reinforce entrenched convictions or to unsettle them; to consolidate trust or to inspire skeptical questioning; to cast a spotlight on charismatic leaders or to embolden voters’ agency? How best to prepare for, conduct, and evaluate televised debates depends on how these questions are answered.

From its outset, a similar uncertainty surrounded the normative role of television as a mass medium. When television first emerged as a feature of political communication, the debate about its cultural significance was dichotomised in almost moral terms. Some saw television as a force for cultural good, bringing politicians closer to the people they represented, thereby creating a more accessible, inclusive democracy. Others saw it as a machinery of narcoticising distraction, leaving viewers vulnerable to demagogic manipulation. Among those who believed that the new medium would instruct and uplift viewers, especially in their civic roles, were scholars such as Charles Thomson (1956, p. 156) who enthused that “It seems certain that television offers an unexampled source for … the political education of the nation as one community”; John Scupham (1967, p. 136), the BBC’s first Controller of Educational Broadcasting, who argued that “Radio and television have shifted the emphasis of political controversy in the democratic countries from abuse to argument”; and Brian Groombridge, who in his manifesto for television as a vehicle for participatory democracy, argued that the medium could

be considered as candidate for a major part in the civilising of our arid communal existence and in the improvement and enlivenment of our democracy, such that more people have the opportunity, the aptitude, the incentive and the desire to play an active personal part in what is with unconscious irony called ‘public life’.

Groombridge, 1972, p. 25

Not all commentators believed that television would serve as a democratic catalyst. Pioneering media scholars, Kurt and Gladys Lang warned that:

The opportunity to observe does not suffice to transform members of the mass audience into members of an active public. While it may arouse interest in viewing similar telecasts, it does not necessarily stimulate—and may even discourage—active political participation. Politics may become a diversion rather than a citizen or partisan activity.

Lang and Lang, 1956, p. 115

As this veritable battle for the soul of culture dragged on through the early decades of television, frequently exposing elite anxieties about imagined tensions between popular culture and mass democracy, few scholars paid attention to the qualities of democratic citizenship that would be normatively desirable. It was as if everyone agreed, without need for critical pause, about what the ideal citizen-student of the televisual “civics lesson” should be expected to know and do. While very few television scholars paid much attention to the normative relationship between television and democracy (Jay Blumler and his collaborators were notable exceptions), the task of asking such questions fell to democratic theorists. Scholars influenced by Jurgen Habermas’ seminal work on the public sphere recognised the potential of television for bringing publics together and, at best, encouraging people to acknowledge and reflect upon their civic bonds. But they noted with some alarm that television was not realising this democratic potential; that it was indeed complicit in the transformation of the public sphere into a space of passive consumption. Habermas (1989, p. 206) stated that under these conditions “publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one cannot respond by arguing but only by identifying with them”. The Habermasian critique became intellectually fashionable at a time during which there was widespread misgiving about the emergence of a media-constructed public sphere (Blumler, 1990; Mancini and Swanson, 1996; Schulz, 1997) in which broadcasters were no longer reporters of politics, but dramaturgical choreographers of the political domain; political performances were becoming increasingly personalised and professionalised at the cost of attention to substantial principle and policy issues; public opinion was increasingly a mediated construct; and audiences were becoming restless in the face of what appeared to be a cozy entanglement between political and journalistic “insiders”. Far from realising the hopes of its early enthusiasts, television was criticised for closing down thoughtful discussion by turning politics into a vulgar spectacle.

This led democratic theorists to turn toward the prospect of deliberation as an alternative to mediated spectacle. John Dryzek provides a concise account of what this entailed:

Deliberation as a social process is distinguished from other kinds of communication in that deliberators are amenable to changing their judgements, preferences and views during the course of their interactions, which involve persuasion rather than coercion, manipulation, or deception … . The deliberative turn represents a renewed concern with the authenticity of democracy; the degree to which democratic control is substantive rather than symbolic, and engaged by competent citizens.

Dryzek, 2002, p. 1

Arguing that public deliberation is the best defense against unreflective mobocracy, Coleman and Gøtze suggested that:

… people turn to populist solutions and illegitimate actions when they feel themselves to be outside the political sphere, incapable of making any meaningful impact through democratic means. The antidote to populist tendencies is firstly, the recognition that the public are entitled to express views and be heard in relation to matters that affect them; and secondly, the creation of civic spaces in which intelligent political discussion can be conducted and habits of informed deliberation developed.

Coleman and Gøtze, 2001, p. 10

In the latter years of the twentieth century and beyond, experiments in democratic deliberation began to flourish. Citizens’ juries, people’s panels, deliberative polls, and online forums were all tested as inventive ways of moving public debate away from the spectacle of slick political display toward intersubjective encounters in which citizens are encouraged to share and contrast their preferences and values. Its proponents argued that, through deliberation, people could learn how to understand one another and, sometimes, change their original positions under the influence of convincing arguments and evidence. The hope was that deliberation might reduce the narrow meanness commonly associated with the sordid politics of “winners” and “losers” by opening up a space in which it was safe to express uncertainty, change one’s mind or even revise the original question.

A Dialogue Between Spectacle and Reflection

Substantial research literatures now exist about the study of televised debates and the practice of deliberation, but hardly ever about the two together. The debates’ literature rarely touches on the question of preference transformation within political interaction, while the deliberation literature has traditionally paid scant attention to the question of how its method could be scaled up beyond the circumscription of artificial mini-publics. Each literature acclaims its own form of discursive enactment, while failing to acknowledge the other.

From the very outset, televised election debates were celebrated as mass democratic spectacles. After the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon debate, Theodore White (White and Johnson, 1965, p. 279) observed that television had enabled “the simultaneous gathering of all the tribes of America to ponder their choice between two chieftains in the largest political convocation in the history of man”, pointing to the scope of television to reconfigure political space by bringing the agora into the heart of people’s living rooms. Television was regarded as the best place available in modern society for shared cultural events to be witnessed by a mass audience. The scope of election debates as “media events” (Dayan and Katz, 1994) to transfix a population, helping citizens to focus on shared relevance, feelings and history, resulted in them assuming an iconic significance within mass-mediated democracy. By focusing collective political attention within a temporally compressed, symbolically powerful juncture, a space for making solemn choice seemed to have been opened up. In reaching a larger audience than any other campaign event; attracting sections of the electorate who are least likely to follow other aspects of the campaign; and dramatising political choice by embodying the available options in performances by protagonists whose values and behavior were open to live inspection, televised debates were uniquely transparent and inclusive. As spectacles, they generated excitement, a rare affect within the logos-bound domain of rational policy choice. It was generally agreed that without such spectacularly stimulated animation, democratic politics would be remoter, duller and less encompassing.

While deliberative researchers have had little to say directly about televised debates, their disdain for politics as showbusiness was bound to distance them from the celebration of anything resembling a media spectacle. Proponents of deliberation argue that democracy requires quality as much as, if not more than, quantity; that while televised election debates reach the people, they invite them to arrive at superficial judgments on the basis of strategic, often seductive performances designed for manufactured audiences who are vulnerable to slickly delivered misinformation. Democratic quality calls for the provision of well-organised opportunities for members of the public—or mini-publics, serving as a political microcosm of the demos—to reflect as critical-rational equals on matters that affect them. It is democratic deliberation’s injunction to reflect rat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Image, Deliberation, and Symbolic Power—Why Do Electoral Debates Matter?
• 1 Introduction: Televised Election Debates as Spectacle and Reflection
• Part I Electoral Debates in the Americas
• Part II Europe
• Part III Select Cases of Electoral Debates Across Different Regions
• Index