Rethinking Election Debates

Abstract

This article considers televised election debates from the perspective of Amartya Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum's notion of capabilities and entitlements. In contrast to the kind of predetermined "information needs" upon which most debate effects' studies have been based, the authors set out to ask citizens to explain what kind of democratic capabilities they hoped to derive from watching televised election debates. Through group deliberation within twelve focus groups, participants articulated five broad capabilities that they felt entitled to realize as viewers of televised election debates. Comprising the first stage of a larger project, which is developing an opensource, web-based platform that incorporates a suite of visualization tools that will help citizens make sense of televised political debates, the research reported here attempts to outline what such debates would be like if they were designed from the perspective of citizens rather than political elites.

The Constitutive Power of Public Debate

“…While these debates are far from perfect in practice, improved design might help. Coleman and Moss (2016), for example, see candidate debates as potentially fulfilling this role, provided they are designed to meet the entitlements of voters and not strategically advantage candidates and broadcasters. Nevertheless, even if in practice debates are currently less than ideal, a recent decrease in candidate debates in the US may be an ominous sign for the fate of US democracy, indicative of an increasing distance between candidates and constituencies (Lerer and Ulloa, 2022).…”

Journalism, Audiences, and News Experience

“…To understand audiences, a critical reflection was needed on assumptions about publics (Coleman & Ross, 2010); politics (Van zoonen, 2005); citizenship (Dahlgren, 1995); and actual versus estimated news use (Prior, 2009). Instead of emphasizing how journalism should matter in a democratic society or focusing on effects and public opinion, political communication has been encouraged to further explore the extent to which users actually rely on journalism to make important political decisions and engage in everyday life (Blumler & Coleman, 2015;Coleman & Moss, 2016;Firmstone & Coleman, 2014;Groot Kormelink & Costera Meijer, 2017).…”

“…In entertainment studies and narrative studies, scholars distinguish between attention and arousal, on the one hand, and more complex affective states such as satisfaction, appreciation, and transportation, on the other (Bartsch & Schneider, 2014;Green & Brock, 2000;Oliver & Bartsch, 2010;Roth, Weinmann, Schneider, Hopp, & Vorderer, 2014). This corresponds to the way viewers of two different current affairs shows enjoyed attention and arousal as forms of temporary mood management that distracted them from the here and now, while the notion of "satisfaction" covered more sustainable experiences, such as finally understanding something or learning something new (Coleman & Moss, 2016;Groot Kormelink & Costera Meijer, 2017).…”

Core Theories of Political Communication: Foundational and Freshly Minted

“…A weakness of the literature in this area is a tendency for scholars, after proclaiming a need to start theorizing from the perspective of the audience (and to research the everyday practices of readers, listeners, and viewers), to veer off into extensive discussion of the audience as a discursive construct rather than as an empirical entity. Coleman and Moss (), however, have developed and applied an innovative and promising way of overcoming this discrepancy. Instead of theorizing from a “top–down” slant on how the media may or may not cater for people's information needs, they propose a “bottom–up” focus on the kinds of entitlements that citizens would like political communication provision to help them to realize.…”