Political debate is the process of presenting arguments and perspectives to the public for discussion and evaluation. It is essential to a healthy democracy and is widely used for training students in civics and political science, as well as for shaping electoral politics.
In the United States, a nonpartisan organization called the CPD has sponsored presidential and vice-presidential debates for every election since 1988. The goal of the debates is to provide voters with the opportunity to sharpen their views in a focused, structured format. The CPD has adopted a set of nonpartisan debate criteria to guide its invitations and decision-making.
To participate in a CPD-sponsored debate, a candidate must have a statistically feasible chance of winning a majority of Electoral College votes (i.e., be on enough states’ ballots). To make this determination, a subcommittee of an advisory panel established by the CPD studied a wide range of evidence: national organization; signs of competitiveness and newsworthiness; and indicators of national public enthusiasm or concern.
Heightened partisanship in American politics has left many citizens frustrated with the notion of political debate. They wonder whether it is productive to have people with different viewpoints speak for hours on end, especially when the discussions seem to devolve into personal attacks and nastiness. This article aims to explore the nature of political conflict in debates, and examine ways it can be shaped and managed to improve political engagement. The authors conduct experiments using a variety of techniques on the Canal 9 Corpus, a dataset of 45 political debates. They find that debates tend to have detectable behavioral patterns, and use this information to develop automatic analysis approaches for assessing the quality of political discourse.