Prof Stephen Coleman
Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds. He is currently writing a book about the mood of the 2024 election, based on a year of listening to phone-in callers.
UK Election 2024
Section 8: Personality politics and popular culture
87. Ed Davey: Towards a Liberal Populism? (Dr Tom Sharkey, Dr Sophie Quirk)
88. Why Nigel Farage’s anti-media election interference claims are so dangerous (Dr Lone Sorensen)
89. Nigel Farage and the political circus (Dr Neil Ewen)
90. Binface, Beany and Beyond: humorous candidates in the 2024 General Election (Prof Scott Wright)
91. What Corbyn support reveals about how Starmer’s Labour won big (Prof Cornel Sandvoss, Dr Benjamin Litherland, Dr Joseph Andrew Smith)
92. “Well that was dignified, wasn’t it?”: floor apportionment and interaction in the televised debates (Dr Sylvia Shaw)
93. TV debates: beyond winners and losers (Prof Stephen Coleman)
94. Is our television debate coverage finally starting to match up to multi-party politics? (Dr Louise Thompson)
95. Tetchiness meets disenchantment: capturing the contrasting political energies of the campaign (Prof Beth Johnson, Prof Katy Parry)
96. “We’re just normal men”: football and the performance of authentic leadership (Dr Ellen Watts)
97. ‘Make the friendship bracelets’: gendered imagery in candidates’ self-presentations on the campaign trail (Dr Caroline Leicht)
98. Weeping in Wetherspoons: generative Al and the right/left image battle on X (Simon Popple)
99. An entertaining election? Popular culture as politics (Prof John Street)
100. Changing key, but keeping time: the music of Election 2024 (Dr Adam Behr)
101. Truth or dare: the political veracity game (Prof John Corner)
There were more televised election debates in this campaign than in any since they first took place in Britain in 2010. These ranged from debates involving up to seven party leaders to head-to-head encounters between the two leaders most likely to become Prime Minister. Sunak was keen to take part because his incumbency advantage was outweighed by his unpopularity disadvantage. As challenger, Starmer saw these as an opportunity to convert unenthusiastic opinion poll preferences into actual votes.
The most common question asked about these debates was ‘who won?’ – a strange obsession of lazy journalists and over-excited party spinners, given the empirical weakness of the relationship between polling-based performance victories and voting preferences. For example, in 2019 post-debate polls voters were closely divided in their evaluations of the performances of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, but this offered no predictive insight into actual voting decisions. Indeed, the notion that the main purpose of election debates is for one or other party to achieve a marketing coup misses the point. Normatively speaking, democratic elections are not about deciding which politician is the slickest performer, but the exercise of informed democratic choice by citizens. The more pertinent question to be asked is, how useful were the debates in understanding the choices before them, determining the veracity of claims being made by politicians and engaging in the electoral process as confident democratic agents? Within a Machiavellian conception of politics, such civic questions might not count for much. But moving beyond strategic politics, vibrant democracy depends upon being able to answer them positively.
I have been tracking how voters view UK televised election debates since they began fourteen years ago. In 2010 two-thirds of debate viewers told us that they had learned something new from watching the debates. In a poll immediately after that election 74% of respondents said that they now knew more ‘about the qualities of the party leaders’, 69% reported having learned more about ‘the policies of each party’ and 53% said that the debates had helped them ‘to understand the problems which the country is facing’ better. Particular beneficiaries of debate-viewing in 2010 were first-time voters: 74% of 18–24- year-olds reported having learned something about the parties’ policies from the debates and 50% of them told us that the debates had helped them to make up their minds how to vote. These trends continued in our polling after the 2015 televised debates and in 2017 when, although Theresa May refused to participate in a head-to-head debate with Jeremy Corbyn, both leaders took part in a BBC Question Time special.
So, what about 2024? We only have one survey that asked about civic learning to go on, in which JL Partners polled 957 debate viewers immediately after the first Sunak-Starmer head-to-head on ITV on 4th June. Asked to agree or disagree with the statement, ‘The debate was useful and I learned things I didn’t know before’ 71% agreed. This suggests that whatever their limitations, these media events still perform a worthwhile civic function. One notable feature of this generally positive appraisal of the debates relates to older survey respondents who were significantly less likely than younger ones to say that they had learned something new from the debates. 73% of 18-25 said that they found the debates useful, as against 50% of 55-74 year-olds. Could it be that older voters feel that they have less need to seek out basic information about the problems facing the country, the policy differences between the parties and the quality of potential national leaders? Or might it be that it is older voters who are now the most political distrustful of the political system? These are people who had lived long enough to have seen a lot of election debates over the years. Perhaps some of them were part of the majority who had felt informed by watching the debates in 2010, but have since become less easily impressed by the patter of well-rehearsed politicians. It will be interesting to explore the socio-demographics of low turnout as they emerge after the 2024 Election. Might older people, who are usually the most likely to vote, have been less inclined to do so this time? Is our democracy facing an experience-weariness crisis?
My overall impression is that the 2024 televised election debates continued to serve a positive civic function, even though that is too often drowned out by the din of spin. In an era in which local public meetings and hustings have become largely nostalgic phenomena, it makes good sense to bring the drama of electoral choice to the televised public domain – which is still the main medium of choice for citizens seeking reliable political information. However, the debate formats of 2010, which were not very different from those of the US televised debates in 1960, are now looking rather worn. There is scope for format innovation. Creative minds should be focused now on how to do debates better in 2029.
