Prevalence of Strategies and Tactics in Political Televised Debates: Different Use Before Versus After Election Day and Between Majority Versus Opposition?

This paper groups a series of debating manoeuvres of politicians under four main strategies: attacking, selling, defending, and other, based on a literature study, a principal component analysis and a content analysis of 99 nationally televised debates in the 2007 federal Belgian election period, 6 weeks before and 3 weeks after Election Day. Overall, sell strategies are most frequently used, more specifically by politicians referring to their success or by expressing their attitude in the past or telling what they are currently doing. But also attacking tactics such as interrupting and demonstrating inconsistencies or contradictions are frequently used. The majority parties use more selling strategies than the opposition parties, which is in line with earlier findings in other countries. Political parties adopt more attacking and defending strategies in the period before Election Day than afterwards. The selling strategy is equally important in the electoral and post electoral period. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]