Political Debates

This is a page for students of PS 240. On 9/22 and 9/24 we discussed political debates. We also have watched and written about the first Presidential and Vice Presidential debates of 2008.

Possible Exam Questions

1. Discuss the change in criteria used for picking Vice Presidential candidates.

2. What factors affect an individual's assessment of candidate performance in a debate?

3. Considering the varying influences affecting how someone views a presidential debate, would you propose any changes to the debate process/coverage? Why? If yes, how?

Readings

K.L. Fridkin, Kenney, P.J., Gershon, S.A. and Serignese Woodall, G. (2008). Spinning Debates: The Impact of the News Media's Coverage of the Final 2004 Presidential Debate. International Journal of Press/Politics, 13, 29-51.

Summary: This study focused on the media spin that followed the last presidential debate of 2004. They found that the media’s analysis in the 24 hours following the debate was extremely one-sided, favoring President Bush. They used several tactics to come to this conclusion, including an experiment, a content analysis, and a public opinion survey. The experiment entailed having one group of people watch the debate and then tracking the stability of their opinions in the midst of a bombardment of media coverage, while the representative public opinion survey was conducted immediately after the debate. The content analysis included analyses of TV, internet, and newspapers for 24 hours following the debate.

K. Kenski and Stroud, N.J. (2005). Who Watches Presidential Debates? A Comparative Analysis of Presidential Debate Viewing in 2000 and 2004. American Behavioral Scientist, 49, 213-228.

Summary:This study focuses on the composition of debate audiences and the differences between debates within elections and between elections of different years. The NAES show that audiences in 2004 were larger than in 2000, and in both years the first presidential debate had the most viewers. The data also showed that those who watched an entire debate were generally older, more educated, with higher incomes, and tended to be more partisan than those who didn’t watch the debate at all.

M. Norton and Goethals, G. (2004). Spin (and Pitch) Doctors: Campaign Strategies in Televised Political Debates. Political Behavior, 26, 227-248.

Summary: “Spin” is a large part of how candidates are perceived before and after debates. If a campaign sets the bar low for their candidate, they can later say that he/she did better than expected. In the first study done, no post-debate information was given, and lowered expectations for a candidate led to a lower rating of performance. However in the second study, when positive feedback was given after expectations were lowered, participants did rate performance positively. However this only happened when the ‘spin’ was provided by a credible news source, not by campaigns.

S. Fein, Goethals, G.R. and Kugler, M.B. (2007). Social Influence on Political Judgments: The Case of Presidential Debates. Political Psychology, 28, 165-192.

Summary: These researchers performed four experiments to evaluate the effects of audience reactions on the opinions and reactions of debate viewers. The first three experiments showed a 1984 Reagan-Mondale Debate to undergraduate viewers. The first experiment divided into three conditions, one that included the whole debate, one that deleted two key sound-bites and the accompanying audience reactions, and one that showed the debate with the sound-bites but without the accompanying reactions from the studio audience and the moderator. In the first condition (the control), viewers judged that Reagan had won, just as most viewers did in 1984. In the second condition, Reagan's ratings fell, and in the third Mondale won decisively. This demonstrated that the reaction of the studio audience significantly influenced the judgments of debate viewers. The second experiment demonstrated that giving breaks to the viewers in the experiment made no difference. The third experiment showed viewers one of two graphs which the subjects were told reflected the approval of the other people in the room. One graph supposedly showed the room's overall approval of Reagan, and the other graph supposedly showed the audience's approval of Mondale. These conditions produced an average of a 36 point net difference between subjects' approval ratings. The fourth experiment showed subjects a 1992 debate between Clinton, Bush, and Perot. Subjects entered rooms with confederates which either voiced pro-Clinton, pro-Bush, or neutral reactions during the debate. This produced a moderate effect on the final opinions of subjects, but not a statistically significant one. All together, this study demonstrated that potential voters are influenced, at least in the short term, by their perception of others' reactions.

T.M. Holbrook (1999). Political Learning from Presidential Debates. Political Behavior, 21, 67-89.

Summary: This study focuses on the learning that takes place from presidential debates. The authors found that while people do learn from debates, that learning is affected by the context that the information is encountered in. People learn more from early debates than the later ones, and the public tends to learn more about lesser-known candidates than the mainstream candidates.

J.W. Jarman (2005). Political Affiliation and Presidential Debates: A Real-Time Analysis of the Effect of the Arguments Used in the Presidential Debates. American Behavioral Scientist, 49, 229-242.

Summary:This study uses the second presidential debate in 2004—George W. Bush vs. John Kerry. Participants used a “continuous response system that provided feedback in 1-second intervals. These data were compared to a transcript of the debate to identify the strongest and weakest arguments made by candidates both for their own party and for the opposition party.” The results showed that partisan preferences strongly affected the participants’ reactions in that each thought their own party’s candidate did better during the debate and thought that they won afterwards. This raises questions about the amount of learning that takes place in a debate, compared to the extent that a debate would simply reinforce existing partisan ties.