Surveys conducted showed more than half of people said that the main effect of the debates was to reinforce their opinions about who to vote for, whilst only 12% said that they changed their mind based on the debates.  The debates did appear to motivate more people to actually go out and vote. Turnout at the General Election increased from 61.3% in 2005 to 65.1% in 2010.  Nick Clegg’s widely praised performances in the debates did not lead to success at the ballot box.  In fact, the Liberal Democrats performed worse in terms of seats in 2010 than they did in the 2005 election dropping from 62 seats in 2005 to 57 seats in 2010.  However, the Liberal Democrats did slightly increase their share of the vote rising from 22.1% in 2005 to 23% in 2010.

I did stuff on this for work so I'm just being a lazy cunt and copying and pasting the above paragraph.  The debates are ridiculously stage-managed and the whole thing about UKIP and the probably Greens getting to participate whilst the SNP and Plaid do not despite them having more MP's is an absolute scandal.