Creating Inequality: Breaking the Rules in Debates

Abstract

As both unabashed contests for power and forums for political candidates who, presumably, already have relatively substantial societal power, political debates offer a site for investigating the creation of more powerful language use for some, less powerful for others. Since the canonical debate form promises an equal distribution of turns and topic control to all debators through prespecification of practically everything that might vary in conversation (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974), the instances within actual debate which violate rules for prespecification are prime sites for revealing gender issues. The out of order and oddly functioning talk in six televised political debates was analysed, holding the promise of fairness of canonical debates as a yardstick. Un-rule-y talk violated rules for who was to speak (uninvited and out of turn order UNs) and what was to be happening (unexpected and oddly functioning MOVEs). UNs and MOVEs were categorised, sorted, and analysed as to where they occurred, who did them, what special features they had, and what consequences they had for subsequent topics, turns, and event structuring. The analysis has implications for the study of gender and language as well as the study and conduct of political debates.

Interruptions of Men and Women in Selected Debates of Al-Jazeera Arabic Channel: A Pragmatic Analysis of the Opposite Direction

“…Further evidence comes from studies investigating interruptions in television and radio settings. Edelsky and Adams (1990) studied television debates in the United States and found that males tended to dominate the discussions by violating the rules of the debate to gain the floor more often as compared to their female counterparts. Kotthoff (1997) also examined Austrian television discussions and found that invited male experts negotiated and achieved high expert status for themselves more often than did invited female experts.…”

Advances in Research Using the C-SPAN Archives

“…We are not the first scholars to conclude that debates are a good source of information concerning sex differences in candidates. Edelsky and Adams (1990) argue that debates are a good medium to evaluate candidates because the environment is seemingly equal. Through their study, they concluded that when the rules are not followed and the debate becomes unequal, gender qualities are more likely to show with an impact on the overall debate.…”

Tracing Gender Differences in Parliamentary Debates: A Growth Curve Analysis of Ugandan Mps’ Activity Levels in Plenary Sessions, 1998–2008

“…Regardless of power differences, women tend to engage less in verbal aggressiveness or dominant behaviour. Studies of language, gender and political debates show that women do not break debate rules to gain advantage as much as their male counterparts (Christie 2003;Edelsky and Adams 1990;Shaw 2000Shaw , 2006. Scholars point to cultural stereotypes about gender and expectations related to social roles as a reason that men and women behave differently.…”