TV election debates have a significant impact on voters’ decision making and should become part of the fabric of major political events, new research argues.
The first comprehensive analysis of the 2015 debates, carried out by researchers at the University of Leeds, found the leadership debates had reached sections of the population least likely to be touched by the rest of the campaign – including younger and first-time voters. Dr Nick Anstead, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) wrote a guest chapter for the report, focusing specifically on social media.
In the chapter, he argues that social media provides a rich resource for understanding public reactions to televised events, but such data needs to be handled with care. “Social media data is not representative of the public,” argued Dr Anstead. “Due to polling carried out for this report, we know that Labour supporters were disproportionately likely to talk about the debates on social media, for example. But this does not make these data usefulness. It just mean we need to think of new ways of understanding and explaining it.”
The researchers are now calling on every party leader to make a public commitment to take part in TV debates in 2020 and suggest that televised debates should take place ahead of crucial decisions of constitutional, domestic and foreign policy, such as regional devolution or the looming EU referendum.
Five samples of 2,000 people were questioned about what they wanted from the debates at five key points: ahead of the election campaign, after the seven-leader debate, the five-leader debate, the Question Time broadcast, and after voting closed.
When asked after polling day which three sources of information had helped them in understanding party policies, the TV debates were rated higher (45%) than newspapers (30%), party leaflets (15%), radio (11%) and social media (10%). TV debates were also considered more helpful than TV interviews with politicians (42%), and only slightly less useful than television news (51%).
More than half of those describing themselves as “not very” or “not at all” interested in politics still indicated that they planned to watch the first debate, on ITV, between all seven main party leaders. It was seen by 7.3 million viewers – a 28.5% audience share.
Further information
Methodology
On the basis of a dozen focus group sessions to establish voters’ information needs, the researchers identified five demands or entitlementsthat people said they needed from the debates in order to perform the role of democratic citizens. They wanted:
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to be addressed as if they were rational and independent decision-makers
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to be able to evaluate the claims made by debaters in order to make an informed voting decision
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to feel that they were in some way involved in the debate and spoken to by the debaters
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to be recognised by the leaders who claimed to speak for (represent) them
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to be able to make a difference to what happens in the political world.
Five nationally representative surveys were then carried out by ComRes with a total of 10,000 eligible voters, to establish if these “entitlements”’ had been met.
Posted 11 December 2015