It's Election Debate Week. Oh, No.

There's a better way to do debates: don't. (That is, do them differently.)

“You now have ten seconds for a reply.” Photo by Lynda B on Unsplash

We’re over halfway through the election and you may have spent part of the last few days reading about the Liberals circulating fake campaign buttons, a depressing, if not uncommon, story of dirty campaigning. If you’re extra lucky, maybe you’ve read about the upcoming leaders’ debates.

The debates promise to be little more than the usual — a series of press conferences clipped for social media masquerading as an exchange of different views. I think debates, as we hold them, are overrated at best and counterproductive at worst. They don’t really change minds, nor do they typically determine election outcomes. They recycle talking points for low-information voters to repeat around the house or at work in the break room. They force short, incomplete, answers to complex questions with little push back, fact check, or counterpoint from either the moderator or opposing candidates. We do them because we’re expected to do them, and because people tune into the spectacle to perhaps pick up at least some sense of what’s going on during a campaign they may be just starting to pay attention to.

The theory behind debates is more interesting than the debates themselves. In theory, debates pit opposing worldviews against one another and demand candidates explain and defend their plans and records — in detail.

If we go back to John Stuart Mill (hey, wake up, stay with me here), debates also hold the (theoretical) promise of two potentially salutary effects for the listener. Over the course of the exchange, one might learn something new. The force of the better argument may sway that viewer, who then re-evaluates their position and even changes their mind. Free speech thrives. Everybody wins, even for losing. If they don’t change their mind, they might come up with new defences and deeper, more robust affirmations of what they already believe, coming closer to the “truth.'“

That’s the theory. As for the practice, see above. That’s not what happens. Debates are part of our horse race coverage of elections. When we write or talk about them, we spend as much time, if not more, talking about the aesthetics of the thing rather than the substantive bits. We talk about who got in a good one liner, who flubbed the performance, who looked comfortable and who didn’t, who attacked too hard or defended too little. We talk far less about the details of policies offered, which are the ostensible reason for holding these debates in the first place. We treat the whole thing as a sport. All things considered, I’d rather watch sports.

Debates are adversarial and partisan, two things that I think are important in a democracy, but which we overvalue, over-reward, and over-emphasize. Partisan, opposition politics is critical to parliamentary democracy, and if we tried to do away with parties, they’d just reform in one way or another. But past a certain point, the more we lean into partisan politics as the only way of doing politics, the more we encourage people to become the sort of partisans who enter an absolute, chauvinistic, my-side-right-or-wrong mode that’s more about protecting the sanctity and security of one’s in-group than it is about solving problems.

There are more ways to conceive of politics than as a competitive sport. I’ve long been a proponent of deliberative democracy, a model of democratic exchange and decision making in which participants meet one another as moral equals, take time to gather information, exchange reasons for and against their preferences, drop strategic goals, and make reasoned judgments and decisions in light of each. When practiced, it works extremely well. In fact, I like it so much I wrote a book about it.

Deliberative democracy isn’t a panacea, nor is it the sole way to do politics. But it should be central to politics. You can have deliberative institutions (like a citizens’ assembly) or you can build deliberation into existing institutions (like the House of Commons at committee or the Senate). Like a good cereal, I think of deliberative democracy as part of a healthy, balanced diet.

I prefer a democracy that is made up of many sites of politics: legislatures, courts, protests, elections, petitions, news media, civil disobedience, (occasional) referendums, participatory citizen undertakings (like participatory budgeting), boycotts, letter writing campaigns, and more. The trouble is we tend to focus on a few of these things and ignore the rest. And the few that we focus on tend to be dominated by well-heeled, professional sorts who dominate the process and outcomes. Everyone else gets theatre, or a pat on the head and a pro forma thanks-for-your-concern. Accordingly, our democracy is weak, vulnerable, and prone to, let’s say, sub-optimal outcomes.

One of my biggest worries politics is the pooling of power. I don’t trust concentrated power in the hands of any individual or group. That is one of the reasons why I oppose an unfettered free market that allows billionaires to accumulate vast amounts of capital, and corporate owners and functionaries to dominate workers. It’s also why I oppose a state that isn’t checked by a mixed market, strong civil society groups, and a robust constitution, lest the state dominate the people it exists to serve.

In the same sense, I distrust the pooling of our politics around partisan theatre, an element of which is leaders’ debates. I’d much prefer to see the candidates seated around a table for a few hours, casually, without scripts, talking about their views with respect for their opponents and, more importantly, respect for the people watching. I don’t like my chances of getting anything like this any time soon, but I’m going to keep asking for it, even as I watch and cover the debates this week.