The first Presidential Debate has come and gone and one thing most viewers will forget was the debate commission’s representatives’ and moderator Lester Holt’s repeated commands early on that the audience must remain silent and save their applause for the end. This makes sense because voters should make up their mind independently and not blindly follow crowd reactions.

The rule change was met with little compliance, though, as the audience cheered and laugh throughout the night. Despite this, the debates are not going to get rid of the studio audience any time soon, which is paradigmatic of a broader reluctance to make sorely needed, substantive changes to the debate structure.

The debates are more like theatre or reality television than reasoned intellectual discourse about policy. Things seem to have gotten worse over time, but this has always been the case. If you look at the debate events which have made history, you will find that they never have to do with substance or intellect, but rather chokes, jokes and zingers. This reflects what the voters truly get out of the debates.

This is unfortunate because of how important debate is. When candidates properly debate, they are incentivized to go deeper into the issues themselves in order to discredit their opponent as well as pressure their opponents to elaborate on their own points. Candidates could explore issues arranged by importance, as this would have the most impact. This more competitive mechanism could deliver important political knowledge to the electorate.

So why do our debates fail so badly at doing this? The rules and terms of the debates we have today aren’t constructed intelligently. Instead of being narrowly designed to produce and communicate political knowledge, they are designed to produce entertainment and pundit fodder. They are designed to be gladiatorial and promote superficiality. This structure incentivizes candidates to try and appear cooler, stronger, or sexier (or whatever traits poll well), than the other candidate, at the expense of arguing about who has better ideas.

Consider one rule that is a staple of every modern debate: the secrecy of the questions. Every debate, moderators and networks are always clear to stress that nobody has seen the questions, and that they are completely random. But why? If a debate is supposed to convey knowledge to the electorate, it would make much more sense to give the candidates the questions ahead of time so they can have the best answers to the question that they will face, and make their case with facts and logic.

If the debates are to serve a rational purpose, the terms must radically changed. Candidates need more time to speak, which would allow them to make a comprehensive case for their policies. The audience should be removed and the candidates should be able to see questions ahead of time. These changes will focus in on the intellectual disagreements and avoid the team-sports culture that squanders real policy discussions. It may even be worth considering the idea of conducting the debate over a written platform, eliminating the attention to speech skills and appearance.

There is a deeper issue here, though. Human nature simply isn’t political in the way we expect it to be. In our private lives, issues like this are rarely of concern. We are able to distinguish between entertainment and reality because we feel the consequences directly. We don’t delude ourselves into thinking we are well informed about business after watching a season of Celebrity Apprentice because the consequences are so intimate. It turns out you should probably learn about management at a community college or in an apprenticeship instead. However, the consequences of believing you are well informed just because you watched the debates are nil. Your individual choice in the voting booth probably won’t effect your life much at all.

As a result, debates are designed to be a spectacle because that is what people want. It isn’t really the fault of the candidates or the media for supplying poor debates. It is our fault for demanding poor debates.

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