In a political world defined by heightened polarization, debate has become the cornerstone of the democratic process. Whether in person or on television, debate has shaped political careers, informed voters and even swayed electoral outcomes. But what exactly are debates about? In reality, they are about perception. In the days that follow a debate, the tens of millions who watch often have very different perceptions about how a debate went.
For example, a common perception is that most political debate takes place online, with people from all over the country and world participating. However, Modupe Akinola and Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School have found that Americans systematically misperceive both the frequency and format of debate.
A typical debate follows a moderator format with a single moderator, typically a TV journalist, asking questions to the candidates and managing rebut time. A panelist format replaces the moderator with several people, and a town hall format involves members of the audience asking questions.
Each question is given two minutes to be answered, with a moderator extending or restricting the amount of time per candidate at their discretion. The debate is also aided by indicators such as traffic lights to give candidates an idea of how much time they have left: green indicates 30 seconds, yellow indicates 15 seconds and red indicates only 5 seconds remain. In addition, a buzzer may be used if necessary. We apply a variation of this technique to analyze the Canal 9 Corpus, a dataset of 45 political debates with 190 participants speaking for 27 h and 56 min.