Do Presidential Debates Matter? Evidence from an Eastern European Context

Do presidential debates matter for the outcome of elections? Do they influence vote choice or have they simply become a new form of political entertainment with little electoral impact? How lasting are the effects, if any, of presidential debates? Given the lack of research, answers to these questions cannot be provided for young democracies, such as those of Central and Eastern Europe. The situation is different for mature democracies, where these questions have been studied since the first Kennedy - Nixon presidential debate. Although there have been instances where the presidential debates have impacted the outcome of the election (for example, the 2000 US election), the overall consensus is that presidential debates have a weak influence on vote choice. This is generally due to the importance of longer-term structural variables. To address the lack of knowledge of debate effects in young democracies, my paper analyzes the impact of the two televised presidential debates that took place between the first and second rounds of the 2014 Romanian presidential election. The paper draws on survey data to examine whether exposure to the debate and perceptions of who won had a significant effect on vote intentions and, more generally, on the outcome of the election. Typical of young democracies in Central and Eastern Europe, the Romanian electoral context is characterized by weak ideological identities and partisan attachments, with few voters having a deeply socialized party identification. This means that voters’ evaluations of the candidates’ debate performances are less likely to be biased and consequently debate effects could be expected to be stronger than those observed in the United States and other established post-industrial democracies. This seems especially likely given the large number of undecided voters and the fact that the second of the two debates took place only four days before the second round vote and would thus not be subject to decay. However, in line with most Western research, I demonstrate, using logistic regression models, the overwhelming influence of longer-term structural factors on vote choice, with presidential debates having an insignificant or weak effect on the electoral outcome. The paper provides prima facie evidence of the convergence between new and established democracies in terms of the behavioral impact of presidential debates.