Politics is a process of making trade-offs between differing interests, values, and priorities. Yet the rhetoric of many political debates seems to ignore this fundamental premise and instead presents each view as completely right and its opponents as completely wrong, often devolving into vitriol. This can make it difficult to understand competing positions and to discern reasonable trade-offs.
Political debates offer a unique opportunity to inform voters and encourage reasoned discourse by providing candidates with a platform and public forum to discuss issues in an open manner. These events are more substantive than a tweet or commercial and embody democratic ideals. However, debates face a number of challenges that must be addressed in order to improve their value for voter education.
A Major Challenge: The In-Person Audience
While audience response to a question can elevate a moment, it can also magnify political gaffes and distract from the substance of a debate. Audience jeers, cheers or laughter can also detract from the overall tone and atmosphere of a debate and amplify moments that are inappropriately emotional or off-topic.
In addition to ensuring that each candidate has a fair amount of time to respond to the moderator-posed questions, it is important that debates remain within allotted time limits to prevent excessive digression and ensure that the candidates are forced to focus on the issues and topics the voters care about. For this reason, several reforms have been proposed to the debate format including the use of a chess clock with each candidate given equal blocks of time to answer a question and rebut their opponent’s responses with colors (such as green indicating 30 seconds left, yellow indicating 15 seconds, and red indicating only five seconds remaining) to indicate how much time is left.
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