Political debate is a form of intellectual competition, but it can be framed broadly or narrowly. People can engage in a debate to come closer as a group to figuring out what is true, or they can become bogged down in defending their immediate positions and attacking the other parties’ positions.
To do it well, the parties must fundamentally want to learn from each other, and they must trust that each will uphold a fair standard of intellectual competition and will not view their personal interests as mutually exclusive with being open to changing their views. This is the essence of civility in negotiation and, arguably, the essence of political argument as well.
When people argue about political issues, they rarely do so without some emotionally charged motivation, such as a belief that something is at stake for them personally. This explains why arguments over politically sensitive topics often heat up, as the parties get impatient with each other’s seeming inability to understand their perspective and restate their positions more forcefully and frequently, interrupting each other and using nonverbal cues to signal their exasperation.
In political debates, it is essential for the parties to agree on the scope of the discussion, to limit the number and duration of speeches, to restrict questions only to those that advance the dialogue toward a mutually agreed upon goal, and to ensure that no one has greater access to facts or logic than anyone else. To explore how such rules might work in practice, IGC researchers have analyzed the Canal 9 Corpus of 45 political debates and used a machine learning model to analyze each debate participant’s behavior and the order in which they speak.
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