Rethinking Election Debates

This article considers televised election debates from the perspective of Amartya Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum’s notion of capabilities and entitlements. In contrast to the kind of predetermined “information needs” upon which most debate effects’ studies have been based, the authors set out to ask citizens to explain what kind of democratic capabilities they hoped to derive from watching televised election debates. Through group deliberation within twelve focus groups, participants articulated five broad capabilities that they felt entitled to realize as viewers of televised election debates. Comprising the first stage of a larger project, which is developing an open-source, web-based platform that incorporates a suite of visualization tools that will help citizens make sense of televised political debates, the research reported here attempts to outline what such debates would be like if they were designed from the perspective of citizens rather than political elites.