Candidates on Television: The 1972 Electoral Debates in West Germany

This article explores the nature and effects of the campaign debates held in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1972. The findings indicate that the debates were bruising personal battles that emphasized issues and ethics. While they did not have any direct effects on either candidate perceptions or issue salience, there is evidence that the debates may have had some important indirect effects on the electorate's ultimate voting choices. Kendall L. Baker is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Political Science, University of Wyoming. Helmut Norpoth is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of New York at Stony Brook. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Political Science Association, Chicago, April 19-21, 1971. the authors wish to express their appreciation to Marilyn Dantico, Robert Hoyer, Kurt Lang, and Ekkehard Mochmann for comments on an earlier draft. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 45.329-345 ? 1981 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/81/0045-329/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.162 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 05:41:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 330 BAKER AND NORPOTH dramatically in the postwar period (Baker et al., 1981; Conradt, 1980) and in which the mass media are said to have played a major role in attitude change and electoral behavior (Noelle-Neumann, 1978, 1980; Norpoth and Baker, 1980). Our goals are to analyze the content of the debates held during the 1972 campaign as well as the nature of the interaction among the participants, and to assess how watching the debates affected popular evaluations of the participants, the parties, and the issues. Our analysis of debate effects will be based on a panel survey,' which puts us in the fortunate position of being able to examine attitude change across time. In order to provide the context in which the German debates took place, let us briefly review the setting of the 1972 election (Conradt and Lambert, 1974; Heidenheimer and Kommers, 1975: ch. 5; Kaltefleiter, 1973; and Kaase, 1973). The German Election of 1972 and the Televised Debates The federal election of 1972 offered the West German electorate the rare opportunity to decide outright which party combination should run the federal government. Each of the four parties in the Bundestag had committed itself to a particular course of action following the election. The Social Democratic party (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) were pledged to a continuation of their coalition, whereas the alliance of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) aimed at unseating that government coalition. While Willy Brandt (SPD) would continue as chancellor in the event of an SPD-FDP victory at the polls, Rainer Barzel (CDU) had been designated as the joint chancellor-candidate by the CDU and CSU. The election had been called one year ahead of schedule to settle precisely the issue which the Bundestag had been unable to resolve, namely, whether or not Barzel instead of Brandt should head the federal government. Barzers attempt earlier in 1972 at ousting Brandt in a vote of no-confidence had fallen just two votes short-amidst charges of vote buying-of the necessary 249-vote majority in the Bundestag. The parliamentary deadlock, which had come about through the defection of a handful of SPD-FDP deputies since 1969, neither allowed the SPD-FDP coalition to govern nor the CDU/CSU 1 The 1972 survey utilized in this analysis was made available by the Zentralarchiv in Cologne, West Germany, study no. 635/636/637; it can also be obtained from the ICPSR in Ann Arbor, Michigan, study no. 7102. The 1972 survey was conducted by Manfred Berger, Wolfgang Gibowski, Max Kasse, Dieter Roth, Uwe Schleth, and Rudolf Wildenmann. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.162 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 05:41:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 1972 ELECTORAL DEBATES IN WEST GERMANY 331 to take over the government. Thus, the voters were called upon to break the tie and install a new government enjoying majority support. During perhaps the most frenzied and bitterly fought electoral campaign since 1949-with an eventual voting turnout of 91.2 percentthe West German electorate was treated to its first encounter with televised debates between the top political figures. A straight confrontation between the two candidates for the chancellorship, Brandt (SPD) and Barzel (CDU), which would have been most dramatic, was ruled out because of the parliamentary nature of the Federal Republic. Chancellors, after all, are not popularly elected. That choice is up to the members of the Bundestag. The match between Brandt and Barzel also would have excluded the leaders of the other two parties, the FDP and the CSU, neither of which regarded itself simply as an appendage of the SPD or the CDU, respectively. As a result, the two television networks in West Germany arranged for a format which provided for the presence of the chairmen of the four parties; parties not represented in the Bundestag were ignored. It so happened that the chairman of the SPD was Chancellor Brandt and the chairman of the CDU was Mr. Barzel. The chairman of the FDP, Walter Scheel, served as vice-chancellor and foreign minister in the cabinet, and the chairman of the CSU, Franz-Josef Strauss, was certain to become a key member in a future CDU/CSU cabinet. These four politicians-Brandt, Barzel, Scheel, and Straussparticipated in three television "debates" held on October 18, November 2, and November 15. The 1972 general election took place on November 19. The format of the debates varied. In the first two, each of which lasted about an hour, journalists played a significant role. They directed questions to the various party leaders, followed up with additional questions, and sometimes summarized what the participants had said either in their answers to the questions or in other campaign appearances. A good portion of the first two debates, therefore, involved interaction between the participants and the journalists rather than interaction between the participants themselves. In contrast, the third debate, which was held only four days before the election and lasted over two hours, was characterized almost exclusively by interaction among the four party leaders. The moderator's role was essentially to keep track of how long each participant had spoken. Content-Analyzing the Debates Our analysis of debate content is based on the written transcripts. It might have been more appropriate to examine the audiovisual appearThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.162 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 05:41:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 332 BAKER AND NORPOTH ances of the participants, but our access was restricted to the written record.2 Our efforts at decoding this record were greatly aided by a coding scheme developed by Klingemann (1976) and successfully applied in content analyses of party platforms, campaign speeches, and newspaper editorials, as well as voter evaluations of parties in answers to open-ended questions by Schoenbach (Schoenbach, 1977; Schoenbach and Wildenmann, 1978). Each sentence spoken by a debate participant was evaluated in terms of the following questions: (a) Does it refer to one of the four political parties represented in the Bundestag or their leaders? (b) Does it attach a positive or negative evaluation to them? If so, the reference to party or leader was coded; otherwise, it was ignored. The Klingemann coding scheme provides for 52 distinct categories of political content grouped in seven broad classes: (1) Ideology, (2) Social groups, (3) Domestic policy, (4) Foreign policy, (5) Government and party management, (6) Personal attributes of politicians, and (7) Nonpolitical properties. (For a complete listing of the categories used in this analysis, see Schoenbach, 1978.) Any time a sentence contained a statement linking a party or leader with one of these 52 properties in a positive or negative fashion, it was coded as a separate "reference." A spoken sentence could contain several such references, or none at all. Distribution of the Participants' Debate Contributions It is one of the cardinal rules of debates, on television or elsewhere, that the participants are entitled to equal amounts of time. This was true for the German electoral debates, even though the parties represented by the four chairmen differed greatly in strength. The debate moderators meticulously monitored the time used by the participants and occasionally admonished them not to exceed their quota. As a result of these efforts, all four party leaders "got in" roughly the same number of sentences. We counted a total number of 1,696 sentences spoken during the three debates, ranging from brief interjections like "grotesque" to seemingly endless, complicated lectures. Even though it appears in Table 1 that Strauss was more verbose than, say, Scheel, the overall distribution of spoken sentences across the four speakers does not differ significantly from equality (X2 = 4.87, df = 3, n.s.). 2 We are grateful to the Federal Press and Information Office (Bundespresse-und Informationsamt) in Bonn, West Germany, for making available to us the typed transcripts of the three debates of 1972. The Zentralarchiv in Cologne, West Germany, also was helpful in securing that information for us. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.162 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 05:41:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 1972 ELECTORAL DEBATES IN WEST GERMANY 333 Table 1. References to Political Leaders in 1972 Debates (percent)