Conventional wisdom in the media argues that voters need more election debates in the campaign. As The Australian put it yesterday: "The great debate [between John Howard and Kim Beazley on Sunday] proved how important it is for our leaders to argue face-to-face in front of voters so they can make an informed choice".
Yet academic research suggests that voters don't find debates all that useful. Although the academic literature, primarily from the US, can be contradictory at times, a few conclusions do stand out.
The first is that while election debates may attract a large audience, the main effect seems to be a reinforcement of pre-existing opinions. These were the findings of the first studies in the wake of the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates. When one reads journalistic accounts of these debates, we are told of youthful, confident and telegenic John Kennedy using the first televised debates to defeat a tired Richard Nixon, who was still recovering from the flu. Yet the academic studies of these debates cast doubt on the media's mythology and show that most voters didn't change their minds and that the debates only served to harden the voters' attitudes to the candidates. The studies showed that the debates were not decisive, with a number of studies even giving the result to Nixon by a slim majority.
Subsequent studies have tended to confirm these findings. Reflecting this consensus, communications scholars David Sears and Steven Chaffee have noted that "the information flow stimulated by debates tends to be translated by voters into evaluations that coincide with prior political predispositions". In plain language, after viewing the debate on Sunday, without the benefit of post-debate analysis, Liberals would have thought Howard won, while Laborites would have seen Beazley as the victor.
A second conclusion that we can take from the academic research is that direct viewing of debates results in only minor shifts in votes. Studies of the Reagan-Mondale debates in 1984 showed that three out of every four undecideds who used debates as a cue to make their voting decision thought Walter Mondale won the debate. The Harris poll gave the result to Mondale by 61 per cent to 19 per cent. History shows that Mondale lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately for Mondale, what the studies revealed is that only a small percentage of those undecided use debates as their principal frame of reference for casting a vote.
The Nine network's exercise with the worm, which showed what an audience of undecided voters was thinking, was entertaining. It will also assist the press gallery in its assessment of the "winner".
But it is largely irrelevant. Given the level of cognitive dissonance in Australian swinging voters, the chances are that these voters, who really don't like politics much, would have watched the Seven and Ten networks on Sunday night instead of the debates on Nine or the ABC.
This tendency to avoid politics where possible is the reason political parties invest so heavily in highly intrusive forms of communication such as electronic advertising and direct mail. Question marks over the effect of debates are further compounded by Australia's Westminster system, where local issues and local candidates often matter far more to voters than the leaders and certainly more than any debate. This is particularly the case as one heads farther from the capital cities to regional and rural Australia, where many marginal seats are concentrated.
One area where the research does support the importance of debates is in the area of agenda-setting. A fairly constant finding is that political debates do have an agenda-setting effect. Paul Keating's tour de force in 1993 is regarded as a decisive debate. Still, the debate's real impact for Keating was in its ability to focus the media on his agenda of the GST and not on Opposition leader John Hewson's agenda of income tax cuts. It is questionable how many swinging voters, who generally dislike aggression, would have been won over to Keating's side immediately by his rather brutal demolition of Hewson.
Academic research simply does not accord debates with the degree of importance that the media does. And it is the media -- not the voters -- who are driving this demand for debates. No doubt the public would much prefer to have their usual programming. The election debates are for the benefit of the press gallery, not the voters. If the media wants another debate, they should say so. But they shouldn't use the voters as the justification for their demands.
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