Debates are interesting campaign events because they call for candidates to cooperate while engaging in argumentative discourse. The stakes are high because of the large viewing audiences they draw and the potential damage that can be done to a candidate’s image should the candidate fail to defend him or herself against attack.
The unscripted two-hour debate allows us to assess the competence of the candidate as a political leader in ways that cannot be discerned through other campaign activities. Despite preparing in detail, candidates cannot control the questions asked of them. Candidates are expected to respond competently when opponents criticize their proposals but they cannot control how their opponents will approach the answers to questions. These conditions can create clashes over issues that have developed in the campaign, including questions about character, policies, record, and more. When the candidates must defend their image without the assistance of advisers, the audience gets a sense of the candidate’s character in action.
Naturally, arguments can threaten the positive image of a candidate as an informed, thoughtful, reliable candidate for office. In their best form, the candidates’ arguments can clearly advocate for their positions while showing respect for another party, its platform, and its candidate for office. Yet debates also create conditions for candidates to engage in aggressive argumentation strategies in their attempts to appeal to supporters and demonstrate dominance over the opposing candidate. Candidates calculate the appropriate degree to which they should “face threat,” as they prepare for the debates. In our research, my colleagues and I examined the degree to which candidates adopt an aggressive face-threatening style, a style that balances concern for the image needs of the other candidate while arguing one's point.
Candidates and campaign staffs might try to anticipate the arguments an opponent will make and plan responses to show themselves capable of handling such threats. Our research has looked at face threats in debate exchanges over candidates’ character, policy proposals, responsibility for problems, use of data, disagreement with one’s opponent, appropriateness of campaign tactics, and strategies of ridicule. The findings show a trend from the 1960 debates continuing through the last campaign we have data for, the 2012 debates: the overall tone of the debates have become more aggressive. This campaign is unique, potentially, for the nature of the claims that the leading candidates have exchanged over character, policy, and campaign tactics, but more importantly, for the strategies of ridicule. Of the categories of messages we examine, ridicule has appeared least often in our data looking at the debates over the years.
The upcoming debates will be interesting to watch because the candidates might alter earlier strategies used to win their party’s nomination and adopt strategies they believe might be appealing to a national audience of voters. Since debates can be thought of as representative moments that enact the democratic values of reasoned discourse, the discussion of politeness and degree of face threat that occurs in the debates will set the stage for understanding the ways that presidential debates inform us about the health of our democracy.
