The case against live debates

 

I had already lost interest in the cabotage policy debate between Wee Ka Siong and Lim Guan Eng before it began.

Every day, there is a new post by either side listing their version of facts regarding the date, platform, or format.

Almost without fail, each post is meant to imply that the other side is a coward and they have something to hide.

But I don’t blame them because, in a way, this is part of the debate – the pre-debate public taunt, similar to pre-fight taunts in a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

More and more people are starting to argue that politicians’ live debates are outliving their utility.

Heavily scripted, extensively prepared, and inherently theatrical, live debates are about shoring up your popularity by running down the other debater.

The highlights of the debate are typically witty comments about the other person’s character rather than an ingenious idea or a nuanced policy opinion.

How much of the cabotage policy debate will be about cabotage instead of MCA’s or DAP’s past failures?

Even if we assume that the debate was purely about policy, live debates have been found to have little correlation with changing the minds of voters.

Without a baseline of truth or a clear winner, live debates carry a subjective risk of widening differences and exacerbating polarisation.

In the end, live debates do not inform us better on the policy matter at hand, nor do they advance our opinions on the candidates at the debates; they only give us public taunts in an already noisy space.

The alternative

The famous writer, Malcolm Gladwell, has recently proposed an alternative to televised debates.

In the same way we test candidates for job interviews, we ought to put politicians through rounds of case interviews to see how they would tackle a real-life problem without any scripts, pre-preparation and showboating.

This would help us gauge the candidates’ thought process, personality, and for the first time, a glimpse of how it would actually be like for the candidate to govern 30 million Malaysians.

I have briefly mentioned this before. It baffles me that as employees, we have to go through four to five rounds of job interviews, in a series of screening, aptitude, knowledge, integrity, skills, criminal background tests, but politicians do not have to go through even a basic curriculum vitae (CV) screening.

To manage a group of three in a company with an annual revenue of RM3.37 million, you need four interview rounds; to manage a country of 30 million with an annual gross domestic product of RM337 billion, you only need to give a campaign speech.

The most difficult job interviews in the world are from the management consulting firms of McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company, which take three out of the top five positions on Glassdoor’s “Most Difficult Companies to Interview”.

Candidates typically take months to prepare for a series of gruelling online assessments, case studies, and personality interviews before they can secure an offer.

To succeed in the case studies, a candidate needs to anticipate a myriad of case types and industries such as:

• What is the size of the market for electric vehicles in Malaysia?
• Assuming that our client is one of the three largest industrial goods manufacturers in Southeast Asia, and they have been experiencing flat market share for the past five years, what do you think is the underlying cause, and what strategies would you adopt to solve it?
• Our client is a fashion retailer that wants to expand her company to an emerging market. Would you advise her to move forward with this?

Solving these cases would require candidates to do mental mathematics of multiplication, division, and percentages without a calculator, building a framework that is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, and to read through voluminous data and analyse it within seconds.

These interviews seemed to have worked. Over the decades, the quality of candidates was guaranteed, and the correlation between interview difficulty and job satisfaction is high.

Companies outside consulting, like software development, design, law, finance, production and others, have similarly introduced job interview assessments that simulate the actual job as a valuable insight to the candidate beyond the perceivably biased CV.

What it could look like

The same could be done for politicians, especially the ones who are vying for a ministerial position in the cabinet. Politicians are given a set of high-stakes case studies, and they are supposed to take a few moments and come out with a broad outline of how they would resolve the problem.

Some case ideas could include:

• A flood has devastated the states of Kelantan and Terengganu, with thousands who have lost their homes. What would you do as a short-, medium-, and long-term measure?
• Recent data has unveiled that 20 percent of the largest multinational corporations have left Malaysia for neighbouring countries. What do you think is the underlying cause, and how would you reverse this trend?
• Malaysia has the highest obesity rate in Southeast Asia. What ideas do you think would be most effective in tackling the prevalence of this life-threatening disease among the populous?

With these case studies, suddenly, it matters less for the candidate to talk about the opponent’s political party, religion, race, relationship history, family background or a myriad of red herrings often grabbing the headlines. Arrogance, overconfidence, and showboating are now less useful.

If the candidate could not handle it on their own, then we could have his/her team solve the case together.

We have relied on the single messiah for too long when the cabinet ought to function as a team. Put a team together, come on TV, get a case prompt, take a few moments, present your answers for the country, win.

That doesn’t sound too hard, does it? After all, we are doing it every day for every other job interview anyway. - Mkini

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JAMES CHAI is a political analyst. He also blogs at www.jameschai.com.my and he can be reached at jameschai.mpuk@gmail.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.