THE ostensible purpose of an election campaign debate is to give candidates a chance to share their views and attract possible voters. Political debates occupy a long tradition: in 1858 a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln challenged Senator Stephen Douglas for his seat in a series of seven debates in Illinois. One candidate would open with a 60 minute speech,and the other would give a 90-minute response. The first candidate would then close the debate with yet another 30 minute speech. While Mr Lincoln would disappear on to lose the Senate race, the debates elevated his national stature and set him up for a successful presidential run against Mr Douglas two years later.
Most debates however, or occupy far less impact. Academic research suggests that while presidential debates can inform a person’s view,they tend to do slight to change it. In their book “The Timeline of Presidential Elections”, political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien looked at every election featuring televised debates between 1960 and 2008 and found that the polling numbers of presidential candidates main up to debates were almost perfectly correlated with...
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Source: economist.com