Few events on the national political calendar draw as many eyes as the nationally televised debates. If conventions represent are like the lavish, PR machine parties sports teams throw for their season ticket holders, the debates are the games. But does that analogy really track? Do debates help determine the "champions" of an electoral season like a win-loss record does in sports? Plenty of smart people have answered that (some good ones here: and here: ).
The general consensus seems to be that debates can have a modest effect on polling numbers but rarely - if ever - has a candidate been able to use a debate to steal victory from the jaws of defeat. But why is that? Some of the theorizing behind these findings could use some work.
Rational Choice theory is one of the dominant approaches in modern political science. It argues that people conduct careful cost-benefit analyses when presented with political choices and select the option that will benefit them the most. This is called "utility maximization." It certainly has its flaws - people rarely have the necessary amount of information to make a fully-informed decision, other biases interfere with proper analysis of that information - but whether it's applicable to a given situation or not, it's a useful frame for analyzing political actions.
So how can we apply rational choice to the debates? If we're going by the purest form of rational choice, people would watch the debates concerned mostly about which candidate could bring them the most material benefit. Put simply, they would think to themselves, "which of these candidates will put the most money in my pocket?" Pundits call these "pocketbook issues."
People differ in their economic circumstances and thus differ on what types of questions they might ask themselves while parked on their couch. The unemployed might ask, "which of these candidates will do the most to get me a job?" or, "which candidate is going to extend my unemployment insurance?" or even, "which candidate is going to make it easier/cheaper for me to get a better education?" Middle class people will want to know about which candidate will protect union benefits or which candidate will make it easier to grow their small business. The elderly want to make sure their candidate will protect Medicare or Social Security. The rich want the lowest capital gains taxes they can get. You get the picture. There are numerous demographics, each with their own set of material interests that candidates to which candidates can appeal.
If this is how people decided their vote, debates would present wonderful opportunities for voters to educate themselves and make the choice that's right for them. But people don't decide their vote based only on material interests (see Larry Bartels's book "Unequal Democracy" for the most in-depth argument of this). But what if we expand the definition of rationality to include other types of benefits, like those obtained by your group, or what political scientists call "purposive" benefits, like the achievement of some sort of political goal such as marriage equality. Again, debates provide plenty of information on these types of issues. So why don't debates do more to change people's minds?
First, most people have already made up their minds - even if they don't know it yet. One of the greatest predictors of vote choice is a decidedly irrational factor: partisan affiliation. Perhaps surprisingly, partisan affiliation is pretty durable. It often starts early and life, shaped by parents and the political events one experiences. Even genetics play a role. The idea of this large group of independents is a myth; most self-identified independents lean toward one party or another.
Second, a phenomenon known as "motivated skepticism" prevents people from objectively evaluating the candidates' arguments. Voters watch debates with a whole slew of biases and preferences that distort a voter's interpretation of what they hear from candidates. They believe that Republicans generally protect small business or that Democrats look out for the poor. Motivated skepticism causes people engage the arguments that fit with their worldview and discard those that don't. Throw in the fact that most people don't know a whole lot about public policy and this resistance to persuasion causes rather uninformed beliefs to solidify in voters' heads. It doesn't really matter how good a case a candidate makes for their platform during a debate.
Media coverage doesn't focus on the issues content as much as other qualities of debate performance. The recent debate between Governor Romney and President Obama provides a solid example of this. Mr. Romney was applauded for being more energetic and displaying charisma and personality (what revelations!) while President Obama was criticized for appearing lethargic and uninterested. Nobody discussed the merits of the arguments either made when discussing who "won", but they were quick to emphasize the points President Obama didn't raise, like taking a jab at Romney's "47%" remarks. And, interestingly, one study shows that exposure to post-debate media does more to drive public opinion than the debate itself. This provides further evidence that people either aren't able or aren't willing to process the new information debates provide them on their own. This failure highlights the weakness of taking a rational choice perspective to certain areas of political science.
All these reasons provide decent explanations for why people who actually watch the debates don't change their minds. But the science is mostly claiming that debates don't change the outcomes of elections, not making claims about their influence on people's decision making. Perhaps part of the reason debates rarely flip elections in favor of one candidate over another is that a large portion of the electorate simply don't watch debates. Estimates say that 67.2 million people watched the Obama-Romney I. But over 131 million people voted in the 2008 presidential election.
Here's where rational choice might be able to provide us with some answers. In the case of this election, voters have already been exposed to 3+ years of the Obama presidency and about 6 years of Romney campaigning. Even for those people who pay minimal attention, they probably already have a decent idea of what they think of the president, or what they think of Republicans, if not Romney specifically. Why waste time watching a debate when you know it's not going to change your mind anyway? Or if listening to one of the candidates is just going to irritate you? The benefits in either case are low (the voter places little value on new information on the candidates) and the costs reasonably high (90 minutes of your time after a long work day isn't nothing). With ever-increasing access to more and more political information widely available 24-hours a day on the internet and cable news, the benefits of presidential debates probably won't increase anytime soon. If anything, they will decrease.
