Adversarial process

An adversarial process is one that supports conflicting one-sided positions held by individuals, groups or entire societies, as inputs into the conflict resolution situation, typically with rewards for prevailing in the outcome. Often in the form of the process assumes a game-like appearance.

The use of a voting system to choose candidates to hold political and military power is often necessarily adversarial. This process requires each candidate to convince voters that they are more trustworthy in the expected future circumstances, than their opponent.

Adversarial politics takes place when one party (usually not in government) takes the opposite (or at least a different) opinion to that of the other (usually the government) even when they may personally agree with what the government is trying to do.

Those opposed to adversarial politics believe that politicians should state what they actually think rather than following the 'party line'. They consider adversarial politics to be cynical and intolerant, with ‘winning’ the driving principle versus attempting to establish the truth. Politicians captivated by the ‘struggle for victory’ corrupt the ideals that brought them into politics in the first place.

Adversarial politics is often blamed for turning the electorate away from politics and their right to participate in the democratic process of their country through voting at elections.

In the US, huge fundraising for presidential elections increasingly results in campaigns focused on personalities versus honest debate, and trading insults versus addressing substantive issues.

In the UK the most obvious example is Prime Minister's Questions, a weekly session where the two main party loudly confront each other.

The use of an adversarial process by the criminal or civil court to decide the social attitude to an alleged wrongdoing of a defendant, penalties to be imposed, and restitution to be awarded to their deemed victim often depends on the adversarial witness questioning. This is adversarial as the opposing attorneys are competing to convince the judge to include or exclude evidence or witnesses, and competing to convince the judge or jury of the guilt or innocence of the defendant, and severity of the impact of the actions (if guilty) on the plaintiff or victim. Lawyers must be held to rather specific ethical codes, e.g. rules of civil procedure, to ensure that their tactics do not cause an undue burden on larger society, e.g. freeing defendants who have admitted that they are not only guilty but intend to offend again. Lawyers differ on whether the process should be seen as strictly adversarial, in order to ensure they retain the trust of clients and the overall process retains the trust of society, or whether the ethics of the larger society should play a role in their behavior.

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