India does not have a recognisable political tradition of campaign debates in the lead-up to an election. This post sets out the normative argument for why campaign debates strengthen representative democracy and the functional reasons the tradition is suited to India, such as its relatively low cost and resistance to corruption. It also addresses some common criticisms of campaign debates, including arguments that they are unsuitable for parliamentary systems and that they strengthen the role of party leaders.
Political talk should not be cheap
Democratic representation is best understood as a political, not a legal, compact between citizens and representatives. In India, for all practical purposes, this relationship is between citizens and political parties. Parties design their platforms and seek election based on political criteria as distinct from scientific or economic criteria. In turn, voters elect parties on similar political criteria. Precisely what these political criteria are can only be discerned through political justification, where parties articulate the reasons they should be elected, and citizens accept or reject these reasons. Thus, under representative democracy, it is the reasons given by parties for seeking votes on the one hand, and citizens’ approval or disapproval of these reasons on the other hand, that shapes the political compact between the electorate and the elected. Simply put, the reasons why a party seeks votes matter because citizens elect a party based on these reasons. These reasons dictate the contours of the compact between citizens and parties and allow citizens to hold parties accountable once they are in power. This relationship is continually reconstructed and a government’s ongoing justifications for its actions and citizens’ response to these justifications also matter. (This is why spaces for political justification by incumbent governments such as press conferences or parliamentary question time are important.) But for our present focus on campaign debates, it is sufficient to note the centrality of the reasons for seeking votes for representative democracy. This centrality is what necessitates that a party’s political justifications be scrutinised, and campaign debates represent one method to do so.
Ideas and identities in Indian elections
If the above description of representative democracy sounds idyllic, particularly in the Indian context, campaign debates can be a step towards such an idealised democracy. Elections in India are more often associated with alliances between political parties and local elites emphasising linguistic or caste identities (layered with monetary incentives). However, because campaign debates as a format of communication privilege ideology and justification over identity, they offer an opportunity to frame electoral contests as a battlefield of ideas instead of identities. While identity politics have been key to the competitiveness of Indian elections for decades, it has notable limitations from the perspective of representation. Citizens voting ideologically is what gives a body its democratic characteristic as opposed to an assembly that is merely a representative cross-section of society. This is because ideological preferences are likely to be cross-cutting, even in socially homogenous constituencies. An ideological voter can continually evaluate a party’s actions vis-à-vis their own preferences whereas a vote based on identity is akin to a one-time absolute delegation of power to the representative. If I vote for someone based on their identity, I have no tools left to continually evaluate their performance. I have chosen them for who they are, not what I think they should be doing in power. Campaign debates can help frame elections as contests of ideas, giving citizens tools to continually hold parties accountable. If parties are elected based on their platforms, they have a greater incentive to abide by them, making election talk less cheap and creating avenues for political accountability.
Pragmatic reasons for campaign debates
Today’s election-media landscape consists overwhelmingly of political parties communicating to citizens unidirectionally. This means politicians are elected without their reasons for seeking votes ever being scrutinised or ever having to respond to their opponents’ criticisms of their platforms. Given the centrality of political justification to representation and accountability noted above, the current lack of scrutiny of party platforms weakens the relationship between citizens and political parties. Campaign debates offer a modicum of scrutiny to party platforms. Further, unlike election rallies, debates compel parties to articulate their views to a multi-partisan (generalist) audience. While partisan (or paid) audiences incentivise demagoguery, speaking to the general public incentivises moderation.
Campaign debates can be focal points in election campaigns and can cut through a fragmented media ecosystem often rife with misinformation. Real-time translations, subtitles, and secondary viewing on news channels would ensure debate performances are accessible to a wide range of voters. Campaign debates are also fundamentally anti-entrenchment devices because they level the playing field between incumbents and challengers. Debates are relatively cheap to organise and can help lower election-related costs, which are a major source of political corruption. Campaign debates themselves are comparatively resistant to manipulation. While the role of moderators is always subject to controversy, even in countries that routinely host debates, the participation of electoral competitors itself ensures the adversarial nature of the process. Finally, given India’s long history of election-related violence, the symbolism of having rival political leaders share a public space amicably in the lead-up to elections can have positive externalities for Indian democracy.
Criticisms, concerns, and potential solutions
The most common criticism of campaign debates is that they represent a ‘Presidentialisation’ or ‘Americanisation’ of politics unsuitable to India’s parliamentary system. This criticism has two reasons embedded within it: that debates cannot be organised in parliamentary systems, and that debates strengthen party leaders vis-à-vis the party itself, which is antithetical to parliamentary democracy.
The above criticism overlooks the fact that several parliamentary countries such as Canada, the U.K., Germany, Austria, Israel, and the Netherlands have all repeatedly held campaign debates. These debates are a distinct phenomenon from the U.S. Presidential debates as they must account for a multi-party system and the fluidity of political parties. India should learn from these experiences as Indian elections often involve a multitude of parties. Countries such as Germany, Kenya, Austria, and the U.K. have all organised two sets of debates: a leaders’ debate amongst front-runners likely to form the government, and a larger debate with all major parties. Countries typically use opinion polls as a metric to identify parties with substantial public support. However, given the risk of inaccuracy and/or corrupt gatekeeping, other metrics can also be used. For example, parties could be invited to debate depending on the number of seats they are contesting, as this is one proxy for influence on government formation and measures already exist to guard against sham nominations. The organiser of the debate is also a key variable, with public broadcasters or election regulators typically required to have more transparent and objectively justifiable criteria for excluding parties than private broadcasters. This is all to say that the nature of the parliamentary system is not anti-thetical to campaign debates per se and intelligent and India-specific solutions can evolve.
The second part of the ‘Presidential’ critique is that campaign debates strengthen the hand of party leaders and personalise politics in a way antithetical to the notion of party democracy. However, party leaders in India are already immensely powerful and political parties are overwhelmingly identified by their leaders. The existing structures that centralise power with party leadership such as candidate selection, funding distribution, and the anti-defection law are all opaque and subject to arbitrary use. In contrast, campaign debates would strengthen a party leader’s standing because they are popular and good advocates for their party’s positions (note that leaders could also decrease their standing through a bad debate performance). Thus, campaign debates strengthen party leaders’ power in a fundamentally democratic manner and one that is responsive to popular opinion.
Campaign debates have also been criticised because they select for candidates who are good on video, prioritising style over substance. While this may be a concern in the long run, because debates at least in part select for ideas, they offer an improvement on the status quo where there is no shared public space for contestation between parties’ competing platforms. While debates are unlikely to change the minds of partisan actors in the way deliberative democrats may hope, there is empirical evidence that debates increase voter competence regarding the central arguments of an election, generate curiosity about parties and candidates, and can even increase voter turnout. The argument for style over substance is ultimately not a reason against holding debates (particularly against the status quo in India) but is rather a call to monitor and improve the quality of debates that are held.
Conclusion
The biggest hurdle to campaign debates in India is unlikely to be any of the criticisms above. A history of campaign debates informs us that they are typically resorted to when there is a relatively competitive election without a clear front-runner, and media broadcasters are motivated by the high viewership numbers that a debate could bring. Given the close nexus between the Indian political class and media ownership and the comparatively foreign and high-risk gamble that a debate represents, the window for campaign debates in India is exceedingly small. A debate in competitive state elections with two or more identified front-runners is possible. However, even if a debate were to be held, there are innumerable ways in which both political actors and media houses could de-legitimise a debate and stop debates from becoming a campaign tradition. Indeed, the non-occurrence of campaign debates is itself a result of the problem that debates seek to solve, a culture of political representation designed to minimise scrutiny of party platforms or governance actions. The centrality of political justification to the relationship between citizens and elected officials means that when talk is cheap, so are votes.