I will present an authentic case: 24 young voters in a Danish “Folk high school” watching a televised, very polemical debate between the two contenders for the office of Prime Minister of Denmark shortly before the parliamentary election in 2015. I asked this group to note down all their evaluative responses to the debate and to the opponents’ debate behavior, for each note marking the exact time—so that I could then collate these notes with the specific utterances and behaviors that they were made in response to.
From this material it is possible to extract an interesting picture of what this group of alert young voters like or dislike debaters to do in a mediated polemical debate to which they are spectators: what speech act types, rhetorical maneuvers, argument types, etc., make them—metaphorically speaking—either cheer or hiss? This picture, in turn, may be held against various normative conceptions of public democratic debate, including my own.