New forms of streamed political debate
The formats of our political debates are stale. There are many different ways that candidates for office could engage with each other, the issues, and the audience. The basic format of the Lincoln/Douglas debates, if not their attention to detail, are still our model for how debates should be conducted. We have barely begun to incorporate TV into the possibilities, much less the internet. Candidates don’t even use charts with agreed-upon facts. Reality shows like The Apprentice, Shark Tank, and Top Chef do a better job engaging the audience with substantive information and issues than our formalized, sound-bite debates. It is long past time for new forms of political debate.
I will here focus on televised and/or streamed debate formats. This is the modern standard, in which the candidates endure some live contest of will and passion for our entertainment and nominal edification. In the status quo approaches, these debates appear to follow formal academic debate rules, except that they are not formally judged or scored. I suspect/assume that the early American politicians had training in the academic format, and fell back on that by default. It also made sense not to score the debates, because the voters were to be the judges.
Once for-profit media began hosting the debates, the media and political professionals indirectly conspired through successive elections to arrogate scoring of debates for themselves. Modern debates are de facto scored by the media leaders and the partisans of each side as they all work in their respective roles to shape the narrative. In the post-debate spin each side makes the case that their candidate won, and the media plays the highlights (effectively, the highest scoring moments) for some time after the debate. The scoring criteria, for better and for worse, point out the most exciting moments, not the most informative.
Because our modern debates are effectively scored anyway, we should go back to the roots and use new (to us) debate formats that are explicitly scored as well as new formats that are not.
Any debate will face a fundamental knowledge/engagement tradeoff between depth of detail and audience engagement for a given duration. An internet debate can do more to educate and engage voters because it can use a longer period of time than a live-streamed debate. Conversely, a live-streamed debate that really delves deeply into any issue(s) must either baffle most of the audience or else spend much more time on each issue than is currently the norm for televised debates, so as to provide voters with requisite background information. While it could be tremendously helpful to begin the discussion of an issue with a review of the background and facts that the candidates agree on, would it sell? The sponsoring media organization and the candidates all want a very large audience, which means that the debate, if televised, must be entertaining.
This use of for-profit news corporations as arbiters of our political debates is a questionable choice. However, this deal with the Devil has had the benefit of settling our debates into an equilibrium point at which large numbers of voters tune in to Presidential debates. The campaigns and media all want large audiences, so the dumbing down of our debates was not necessarily a deliberate craven act, it may also have been a natural market optimization. As politicians and media work to engage large audiences, we can expect a continued decline in substantive content and further appeals to basic mammalian rituals of dominance and submission. Eventually, we will inevitably elect a brute primate with no concern for the truth and a finely hone instinct for sadistic display.
Finally, it should be possible to play the interests of the media against the candidates in the realm of public participation and interactivity. The candidates will do everything they can to control the situation, and so work toward negotiated debate formats that diminish spontaneity to the extent possible. In contrast, the media sponsors should love the exciting moments of public humiliation that true spontaneity will provide. The town hall format has apparently been heavily controlled by the candidates, given the very low surprise and spontaneity of the citizen involvement. Accordingly, I suspect much of the innovation in participatory formats must be pioneered at the Congressional level, where the relative balance of power between the candidates and media sponsors is more heavily weighted toward the media.
Explicitly Scored Formats
Agreement format: It might be particular helpful in this age of hyper-partisanship to engage in a format that rewards candidates for finding areas of agreement. The debate would be similar to current formats, but the rules should include more back and forth. The candidates will each state their positions on the issue being discussed. Perhaps three issues could be discussed in an hour-long debate. Candidates would get one point for each item of agreement. A bi/non-partisan panel of judges would rule out any trivial agreements (“Well, Bob, I agree that you said your name is Bob, but everything you said after that was fake news.”) Candidates would earn points for offering compromise, and lose points for attacks. In a competitive district, this format may help to encourage an honest discussion of the issues.
The knowledge/engagement tradeoff for the agreement format is masked by the judges. Many voters will not know the implications of a concession. In a typical hour-long debate, the candidates will have strong incentive to appear reasonable by playing up their minor concessions. The judges will presumably know the issues well enough to give lower scores for minor concessions. Perhaps the after-debate news/entertainment can include discussion among the judges rank-ordering the originality and substance of any concessions or compromises in the debate.
One can imagine many entertaining variants of the agreement format involving interactions with the judges and/or the audience. For example, the goal of the exercise could be to find non-trivial agreement and then convince partisans to come along. Perhaps there could be two partisan panels of judges who the candidates must persuade to agree to join some compromise. A high participation variant could substitute votes from the party-identified audience. Too-easy agreement will show up as high agreement from the whole partisan spectrum.
Public service contest: In 2005 I founded a political action committee, Goodworks-PAC, to support democratic candidates who would campaign via public service events. There had been a few candidates who did nothing but public service work as their campaign “rallies”. The candidate and his/her volunteers worked together intensely, and this style of campaign was seen to forge deep bonds between the candidate and a relatively small number of volunteers. The technique is difficult to put into practice in a state-wide or national campaign, but that was not my purpose.
For Goodworks-PAC I envisioned an alternative form of primary campaign debate between many democratic candidates in a deep-red (I.E hopelessly republican) congressional district in a Presidential swing state. Each of these “debates” would be scored by the number of volunteers the candidate could turn out. Obviously, if we could get many democrats competing to turn out democrats for public service events in the red parts of swing states, then that would help us win those swing states in the state-wide elections. I was able to recruit candidates and organize events, but I was amazed to discover that every candidate thought they could win the whole election. Fostering cooperation among the democratic candidates, even in deep red districts, was surprisingly difficult. Accordingly, for this to work, the public service contests between candidates need to be truly competitive. Score the candidates on the outcomes they (and their parties) produce: pounds of trash picked up, number of people served, liters of blood donated, etc.
Culminating event format: A televised discussion between the candidates could be the final event in a longer-duration online discussion. As a scored format, the culminating event would advantageously provide a mechanism for bias in the outcome. In particular, in a highly partisan/gerrymandered district, the inevitable winner has no incentive to elevate the stature of his/her opponent by participating in a debate. The out-party candidate does have incentive to work with local media and online to educate voters. However, those outlets do not want to anger the incumbent who is about to be re-elected. A scored format can be constructed to assure a televised victory for the incumbent, which will provide political cover for the media to work with the out-party candidate in the online portion of the debate.
Implicitly Scored Formats
Agreement format: We can work candidate agreement into a standard, non-scored format. For example, a debate could have ground rules around two different clocks. When an issue is introduced, the candidates have the first bolus of time to articulate basic facts and history of the issue that they agree on. Voters will gain basic background information and they will see how well the candidates are able to work together. If the candidates can agree on basic facts, then the second clock starts and they can articulate their distinct policy views on the issue. If no agreement is found, the debate instead moves on to the next issue.
Legislation-based format: A format centered on drafting legislation would be instructive for a Congressional debate. The candidates and their advisers would all work together to draft legislation that they agree on. Notionally this would be the district’s legislation that will be proposed in the next Congress no matter who wins. This would also be a proverbial “lock them in a room until they work it out” kind of format. As the candidates and advisers work together over some number of sessions, the process would be caught on camera and edited for TV under agreed-upon rules. The text of the proposed legislation would be available for questions and comments through-out the rest of the campaign, which will provide further opportunities for the high information voters to learn more about the candidates’ thinking.
Another legislation-based format could engage the candidates and audience in a detailed examination of the impact on the district of a small section of law or a regulation. This would be something like the non-scored agreement format in which the candidates start by finding facts that they agree on. In this case, the legislation or regulation is the bedrock fact. But is it on balance beneficial or harmful to the district? The format could make use of audience voting, expert testimony, policy simulations and other interactions to make the proceedings interesting and effective. The format could be a single live event or a culminating event that is edited for TV under a set of agreed-upon rules.
Apprentice format: Now, in the era of Trump, it should be possible to institute debates modeled after the President’s hit show, The Apprentice. There are many management and government simulations, where a management team spends a few hours playing their roles in a hypothetical real-world event that would take place over days or months. The military conducts simulations of this sort for combat exercises, and so could the competing candidates and their advisers. Each candidate team would work through the same exercise simultaneously. The process would be caught on camera and edited for TV under a set of agreed-upon rules. The voters will have a chance to compare the leadership style of the competing candidates and their advisers when placed in the same, difficult situation.
Another variant of the Apprentice format would involve constituents and real-world outcomes. Rather than an exercise, each candidate team will be responsible for an equivalent politico-economic problem to help solve. For example, each candidate will work with one small town in the district, selected from a pool of matched small towns. Over the course of the campaign, the candidates will work with the citizens of the town (or owner of the business, county program, school district, etc) to solve the same problem that both towns face. The process would be caught on camera and edited for TV under a set of agreed-upon rules. The voters will have a chance to compare the leadership style of the competing candidates and their advisers in the context of normal, daily events.
Televised online format: In Presidential and some state-wide races, there is enough of an audience to create profitable TV from ongoing, online policy debate. This format would basically be a modernized Lincoln/Douglas. Each candidate will write or present a considered opinion on an issue. The candidates will then respond and critique in writing and/or via video. The back and forth can continue as long as the candidates feel there is more to be said. This primary material will be enhanced by a Natural Language Processing interface that will help interested voters and journalists find passages of note. The structure of the argument can also be graphed automatically for logical evaluation. The resulting pile of structured and unstructured data should be a rich source of material for TV segments. In addition, the media corporation that develops better automation for constructing informative TV segments from the data might win more viewers.
Stylized combat formats: If we drop the constraint that candidates should be dignified — and at this point, why not — then there are many more possibilities still. For example, why merely content ourselves with the Al Smith dinner for candidate comedy. Why not have a face-to-face comedy smack-down? We needn’t stop there; we could even have actual combat. Presidential candidates are competing to be commander in chief, so why not show them leading in battle? While they could conceivably preside over existing combat exercises, per the Apprentice format, that would be difficult to do without revealing secrets. Instead, the candidates should lead their forces in a giant paint-gun battle that includes advanced paint-gun weaponry. Stylized combat would make for fun TV that lots of voters would watch.
There are many different ways we could require our candidates to compete. It is absurd that we are limiting ourselves to such a crabbed view of what the competition between candidates could entail. What would it take to start innovating?.
