A Model of Presidential Debates

TL;DR

This paper models presidential debates as strategic events where candidates' participation decisions are uninformative, regardless of their qualities, due to perceived costs of opting out.

Contribution

It introduces an endogenous game-theoretic model showing that debate participation is uninformative about candidate qualities in equilibrium.

Findings

Debates occur regardless of candidate quality.

Candidates' decisions to participate are strategic and uninformative.

Opting-out is perceived as worse than losing a debate.

Abstract

Presidential debates are viewed as providing an important public good by revealing information on candidates to voters. We consider an endogenous model of presidential debates in which an incumbent and a challenger (who is privately informed about her own quality) publicly announce whether they are willing to participate in a public debate, taking into account that a voter's choice of candidate depends on her beliefs regarding the candidates' qualities and on the state of nature.It is found that in equilibrium a debate occurs or does not occur independently of the challenger's quality and therefore the candidates' announcements are uninformative. This is because opting-out is perceived to be worse than losing a debate and therefore the challenger never refuses to participate.