Latin American Electoral Debates: A Window to Media-Politics Interactions

CAROLINA VERENA FRANCO HÄNTZSCH

Ciudad de Buenos Aires

Congreso; 27th World Congress of Political Science; 2023

IPSA - International Political Science Association

n the context of the current “mediatized” democracies, televised electoral debates are growing in practical, theoretical and normative importance. Normatively, they channel aspirations regarding democratic representation and accountability, and an informed citizenship. Practically, they reach large audiences and may have the potential to impact the voting behavior of some portion of them. Theoretically, they are key to observe how media and politics interact –a particularly interesting object from the compared media systems standpoint. Latin American presidentialist democracies have followed the global trend: at least one debate among presidential candidates has been held in most of the region’s countries. But behind this common fact, important variations across time and space are found in the ways debates have been held. This paper aims to systematize and explore these variations, with the understanding that they tell something about the ways the political and media systems interact in the region. It does so by collecting evidence on 319 presidential debates across 18 Latin American countries, since the turn to democracy and/or TV massification to date. Interviews and secondary source revision, including newspapers, audiovisual register and official documents, were carried on for this purpose. Four relevant dimensions of variation were then systematized: the degree of debate’s penetration; the quality of the entity that has organized them; the preferred formats; and the regulatory framework on the subject. Adding these up at the country level, finally, three broad trajectories were found, which can be argued to be defined according to the institutionalization of the practice. In a nutshell, debates have been either formally institutionalized, routinized, or have not been institutionalized at all. These results open interesting lines of future inquiry, including the question as to what explains the encountered differences, as well as theoretical discussions such as how dynamics are to be incorporated to system-led reasoning, how agency and structure interact, and how the compared media systems literature is to be applied in Latin America and how productive a combined approach with neo-insitutionalism could be.