desktop masthead background

Page content

Oct 3, 2016

Study: Candidates don't dodge tough debate questions
Nearly everybody thinks that presidential candidates routinely dodge hard-hitting questions, providing evasive answers to simple questions.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Nearly everybody thinks that presidential candidates routinely dodge hard-hitting questions, providing evasive answers to simple questions.

But an Ohio State study that analyzed the full transcripts of 14 U.S. presidential debates from 1996 to 2012 provides some surprising insights that might temper that belief – and help explain why people believe politicians are evasive.

The research found that presidential candidates accused their rivals of evasion quite often – 54 times in the 14 debates analyzed.

But rivals were actually guilty of some form of evasion no more than 35 percent of the time that they were accused, the study found.

“The candidates aren’t really good at accurately identifying when their opponent was evading a question,” said David Clementson, author of the study and doctoral student in communication at The Ohio State University.

“In fact, candidates often accuse their opponent of evasion when they themselves are avoiding the question they were asked.”

The study appears in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Language and Social Psychology.

Accusing candidates of evasion is a timeless tactic in political debates, right up to today, Clementson said.

“You have yet to answer a single serious question,” Sen. Marco Rubio told Donald Trump during a Republican presidential primary debate on March 3.

Journalists, too, often see candidates as evasive. “Senator, you didn’t answer the question,” NBC reporter Lester Holt told U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders during the Democratic debate on Jan. 17.

To learn more about presidential candidate evasion, Clementson did a content analysis of 810 question-answer sequences during the 14 presidential debates from 1996 to 2012. He looked specifically for cases where one candidate accused the other of not answering the question asked, dodging the question, or refusing to answer the question.

Accusations of evasion were bipartisan – Democrats made 26 such allegations while Republicans lodged 25.

When Clementson analyzed the answers of candidates when they were accused of evasion, he found that 35 percent of the time they did discuss an off-topic issue during the answer, which indicates evasion. Still, in every case in which they were accused of evasion, the candidates at least briefly mentioned the topic of the question.

“There wasn’t any case where the candidate didn’t at least make some effort to talk about the question at hand,” he said.

Read the complete research story