Presidential Electoral Debates Under the Deliberative Approach. Mexico Case, 2012 and 2018

Abstract

Electoral processes and associated practices of political communication represent essential elements of democratic politics. I propose to enrich our understanding of electoral campaigning with a deliberative perspective. The key advantage of a higher deliberative quality in electoral campaigns is to enhance the rationality of citizens’ votes, a factor that is especially crucial in less established democracies. I analyse the deliberative and discoursive behaviour of presidential candidates in six debates carried out in the Mexican Federal Elections in 2012 and 2018.

To evaluate the deliberative quality of the debates, I used elements of the Discourse Quality Index (DQI). The results of the 2012 election show that, in contrast to the first two debates that carried out the traditional format, the design of the third (#YoSoy132) forzed the candidates to justify their stances and be in contact with each other through dialog. On the other hand, in the 2018 election, in which moderators, audiences and candidates directly interacted with each other, debates increased their deliberative quality in many aspects, although not necessarily in the level of justification.