Deliberative qualities in televised election debates: the influence of the electoral system and populism

Abstract

Concerns are raised repeatedly about the quality of televised debates. Both a country's electoral system and the presence of populist candidates have been argued to influence the deliberative qualities of these debates. By using an extended version of the Discourse Quality Index, this study conducts a content analysis of 12 televised election debates in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2015. Against expectations, results show that politicians in multiparty systems do not use more justifications for policy positions and are not more respectful in the televised debates. Rather, this study uncovers a clear populist challenge to key deliberative debate qualities across party systems. Left-and right-wing populist politicians take more positions without proper justification and right-wing populists' presence in the televised debates increases the number of disrespectful interactions, lowering the deliberative qualities of the televised debates in different electoral contexts.

The Resilience of Pandemic Digital Deliberation: An Analysis of Online Synchronous Forums

“…In the original DQI (Steenbergen et al 2003), there was a distinction between "qualified" and "sophisticated" justifications of demands, depending on the number of reasons given for a demand. However, following other studies (Davidson et al 2017;Marien, Goovaerts, and Elstub 2020), we accept that from a deliberative perspective, it is not necessarily superior to have more reasons for a demand, providing a reason is offered. Furthermore, we take the distinction between respect for "persons" and "demands" from Marien, Goovaerts, and Elstub (2020), along with the coding of speech acts without demands with "non-justification" related codes.…”

Comparación entre la cobertura de la prensa a campañas presidenciales y la agenda de los periodistas que conducen debates

“…La forma que toma la cobertura de los candidatos en una campaña y cómo son abordados en un espacio televisivo en vivo han sido desafíos permanentes en diversos países. Por ejemplo, Marien et al (2020) muestran que los discursos populistas de ultraderecha han disminuido la calidad deliberativa de los debates televisados en Europa, mientras Montez y Brubaker (2019) dan cuenta de un aumento en la agresividad del discurso de los candidatos estadounidenses entre 2015 y 2016.…”

Delving into the divide: how ideological differences fuel out-party hostility in a multi-party context

“…These subsequently trigger positive feelings towards their own group and negative or even hostile feelings towards the out-party electorate. Ultimately, this literature strand therefore attributes the rising trend of affective polarization in many countries, mostly to developments such as more negative elite rhetoric in campaigns (Marien et al, 2019), the surge of partisan news coverage (Levendusky, 2013), and selective exposure on social media (Stroud, 2010), all of which increase citizens' party or political identity and thus ultimately results in higher levels of affective polarization.…”