ELECTORAL CONSEQUENCES OF WINNING TELEVISED CAMPAIGN DEBATES

This study explores the long-neglected impact of a candidate being perceived as the "winner" of political debates on individual voting behaviour in West Germany. While there has been much research on the effects of debates on perceptions of candidate policy stands and personality atttributes, there has been little work that attempts to guage how much "winning" the debate helps a candidate at the polls. I investigate this process with straightforward probit models of the vote choice, including party identification and candiate evaluation as well as whether the individual judged a particular candidate as the "winner", or "fared best" in the debate. These models are run for the 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1983 elections in West Germany. The results show that there is a consistent impact of "winning" the debate on individual voting choices in West Germany; controlling for party and other factors, there is a significantly higher probability of voting for the party of the politician the respondent feels won the contest. Debates, then, do ultimately make a substabtial electoral difference. © 1990 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research.