A New Opportunity for Democratic Engagement: The CNN-YouTube Presidential Candidate Debates

Abstract

The 2007 CNN-YouTube Presidential Candidate Debates provided a unique opportunity for Americans to engage in national political discussion. For the first time in American political history, the public was invited into national debate discourse through submissions of video questions to YouTube for possible inclusion in two nationally broadcast candidate debates. Content analysis was used to examine the nearly 8,000 submissions to uncover both the demographic populations represented and the submitted questions' characteristics to determine if the debates provided a viable method for increasing citizen mobilization and redefining democratic participation in the Internet Age. Results indicate that traditionally politically underrepresented or disengaged populations were present in a significant number of submissions and that the submissions were politically substantive.

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