https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3060-621X
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
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 justify their policy positions more 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 adopt more positions without proper justification, and the presence of right-wing populists in the televised debates increases the number of disrespectful interactions, lowering the deliberative qualities of the televised debates in different electoral contexts.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this paper were presented at ‘New World of Comparative Political Communication’ at Texas A&M University (2016), MPSA General Conference in Chicago (2017), ECPR Joint Sessions in Nottingham (2017), and Dutch-Belgian Political Science Meeting in Leiden (2017). We would like to thank the participants and discussants, André Bächtiger, as well as the journal's anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and constructive insights. In addition, we thank all independent coders for their valuable assistance in transcribing and coding the data.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/v435w/.
Notes
1 We distinguish and focus on two types of disrespect, i.e. towards a policy and a person (Brooks and Geer Citation2007). The term (dis)respect is used to refer to (dis)respectful statements expressed towards the policy positions of another politician. The term (in)civility is used to refer to (dis)respectful statements towards another politician as a person, e.g. personal attacks.
2 We focus on the provision of justification for policy positions, respect towards other politicians’ positions and civility, as key deliberative qualities that are beneficial to democratic performance and that have caused concern recently. There are other deliberative qualities that merit study as well. Yet we do not expect that all ideal-type elements of deliberation will be present during a televised debate in which politicians strive to make their positions on different issues clear. Party leaders will generally try to convince the electorate to vote for them by distancing themselves from the issue positions of the other politicians in the debate. Constructive politics or opinion change amongst the party leaders themselves, for example, is something we do not expect to occur in these debates (Davidson et al. 2017).
3 The populist ideology is mostly viewed as a thin ideology that needs to be combined with other thick ideologies to be a full ideology, e.g. nationalism for right-wing populists and socialism for left-wing populists. Left- and right-wing populists thus share the same populist ideology, but differ because there is another thick ideology attached to it (Mudde Citation2004).
4 Incivility can also occur when politicians are not talking about specific proposals that should (not) be made. Therefore, additional debate interventions (N = 164) were identified. In these interventions, politicians react towards another politician or talk about another politician without talking about specific proposals. This led to a total of 1276 speeches used to analyse the level of civility.
5 This is not the case when non-populist politicians react to left-wing populist politicians: they are uncivil towards them in 25.4% of the cases.
6 To investigate this, we only included those debates in which populist politicians participated, and those speech acts that were directly targeted at another politician; 653 speech acts of non-populist politicians were directed at another politician of which 502 were directed at another non-populist politician, 80 at a right-wing populist politician, and 71 at a left-wing populist politician.
7 While there are differences between populist right-wing and populist left-wing parties, there are no differences between the non-populist parties according to left‒right ideology regarding the three quality criteria.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Sofie Marien
Sofie Marien is Associate Professor at the University of Leuven where she is director of the Democratic Innovations and Legitimacy Research Group. Her research has appeared in journals such as Political Behavior, European Journal of Political Research, European Sociological Review, Political Research Quarterly. [[email protected]]
Ine Goovaerts
Ine Goovaerts is a doctoral candidate in the Democratic Innovations and Legitimacy Research Group, University of Leuven. Her research focuses on the quality of political debate, with a specific focus on incivility and simplistic argumentation. [[email protected]]
Stephen Elstub
Stephen Elstub is a Senior Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Newcastle. His research interests include deliberative democracy, political participation and democratic innovation. He has published in numerous international political science journals. His most recent books include The Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance (Edward Elgar 2019), Deliberative Systems in Theory and Practice (Routledge 2018) and Deliberative Democracy: Issues and Cases (EUP 2014). [[email protected]]