IVAN ISLAS

Abstract

Electoral processes and associated practices of political communication represent essential elements of democratic politics, but they should not only be judged on the basis of political marketing criteria. By contrast, 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 behaviour of presidential candidates in the three debates carried out in the Mexican Federal Election in 2012. My analysis sets out to assess the deliberative quality of presidential candidates in different debate formats. While the first two debates followed variations of a traditional format, the third debate (“YoSoy132”) was designed in a way that force candidates to more extensively justify their positions and engage with one another in a more dialogical fashion. To evaluate the deliberative quality in the three debates, I use elements of the Discourse Quality Index (DQI). Results show a higher quality of deliberation in the “YoSoy132” format compared to the traditional format, indicating that different designs of campaigns indeed matter for the qualities of campaigning.