Policy debate

This article is about policy speech competitions at the high school and college level. See Debate for other types of debate competition.

Policy debate is a form of speech competition involving two teams of two debaters based on a resolution phrased as something the United States federal government "should" do. It is also referred to as cross-examination debate because of the 3-minute questioning period following each constructive speech. Most affirmative teams present a specific policy option, or plan, as a normative defence of the resolution. However, some teams partake in alternative forms of debate, including performance, personal advocacies, or otherwise "critical" approaches.

High school policy debate is sponsored by the National Forensic League, the National Catholic Forensic League, the National Christian Forensics and Communication Association, or one of the regional speech organizations. Collegiate debates are generally competed under the guidelines of the National Debate Tournament (NDT), the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA), the National Educational Debate Association (NEDA), or the National Forensic Association's Lincoln Douglas (NFA-LD) debate (a policy variant of the high school LD format).

History of policy debate

NFL rules had 4 minute rebuttals until the late 1990's, but rebuttal length was increased to decrease the pressure on the 1AR who must address all the arguments raised in the negative block.

Style and delivery

Speed

Policy Debaters' speed of delivery will vary from league to league and tournament to tournament. In many tournaments, debaters will "spread", or speak very quickly (and, in theory, clearly) in order to read as much evidence and make as many arguments as possible within the time-constrained speech. The fastest speaking debaters in the nation speak at around 6-8 words per second.

In high school competition, this rapid-fire delivery is a major source of controversy in the debate community. Rapid delivery is encouraged by those who believe that increased quantity and diversity of argumentation makes debates more educational. Others, citing scientific studies, claim that learning to speak faster also increases short and long term memory. A slower style is preferred by those want debates to be understandable to lay people and those who claim that the pedagogical purpose of the activity is to train rhetorical skills. Most debaters will vary their rate of delivery depending upon the judge's preferences.

Some unskilled debaters slur words together making their speaches nearly unintelligable at times. Many critics are willing to prompt debaters by yelling "clear!" or variants when they can no longer understand. Most judges will deduct from the speaker points of a debater whom they consider unclear.

See the following for a discussion of the issues.

Template:Journal reference issue available at [1]
Template:Journal reference issue available at [2]

Flowing

Debaters utilize a specialized form of notetaking, called flowing, to keep track of the arguments presented during a debate. Conventionally, debater's notes are divided into separate flows for each a different argument in the debate round. There are multiple methods of flowing but the most common style incorporates columns of arguments made in a given speech which allows the debater to match the next speaker's responses up with the original arguments. Some refer to this as the "civil war reenactment" style of flowing. Certain shorthands for commonly used words are used to keep up with the rapid rate of delivery. For example, the abbreviation 'HR' may be used to denote 'Human Rights'. The abbreviations or stand-in symbols can and do vary between debaters.

Theory

Burdens of the affirmative

Stock issues

Traditional policy debate theory states that the affirmative plan must fulfill certain issues, called the stock issues. The first four issues must be presented in the affirmative case. The last issue, topicality, need not be included in the affirmative case, but must be defended if the negative team raises arguments. They are:

Solvency: The plan should solve for a harm in the status quo or created an advantage over the status quo
Harms: The affirmative should demonstrate a harm in the status quo. This stock issue is often labelled as an advantage instead. An advantage may either be an actual harm or merely an opportunity cost harm.
Inherency: The status quo must not solve the case. There are three types of inherency:

Structural inherency: Laws or other barriers to the implementation of the plan.
Attitudinal inherency: Beliefs or attitudes which prevent the implementation of the plan.
Existential inherency: The plan hasn't happened yet.

The affirmative team has the power of Fiat (Latin for "let it be so") to overcome such inherent barriers. Thus, the debate centers on whether the plan should happen rather than whether it will happen. Inherency is often not labelled in the 1AC but rather incorporated into advantages such that it becomes clear why the plan is an advantage over the status quo. The popularization of offense/defense in policy debate effectively squelched debate over inherency because the affirmative will usually win Inherency as a stock issue as long as there is a change the status quo will not solve the case.

Topicality: The affirmative case must affirm the resolution.
Significance: The affirmative must be signficant. This stock issue has also fallen out of use in part because of the difficulty of defining what is and what is not significant. Generally, any advantage over the status quo makes the plan significant.

An alternate way to list the stock issues, and a possible easier way, is "Solvency, Harms, Inherency, Topicality, Significance," or S.H.I.T.S. or the classroom appropriate variant S.I.T.H.S.

Advantages

Other external benefits that are created in addition to solving the harms addressed by the affirmative are called advantages. While an affirmative team isn't required to present any advantages in their case in order to fulfill the affirmative burdens, they are often included for strategic reasons to increase the scope of the plan, and to prove that the plan amiliorate the status quo. The negative team will often present disadvantages which contend that the affirmative plan causes undesirable consequences, so the affirmative team often needs countervailing advantage to generate a net positive outcome. Like disadvantages, advantages often have exaggerated or unrealistic impacts, such as causing world peace and ending racism forever.

The affirmative team may also present a decision calculus for the judge to decide the case: for instance, they may insist that the judge examine the case in a deontological rather than consequentialist framework, looking at the intent of the case, rather than its actual effects.

Negation theory

Negation Theory is a theory of how a debate round should be decided which dictates that the negative need only negative the affirmative instead of having to negate the resolution.

Negative strategy

After the affirmative presents its case, the negative can attack the case with many different arguments, which include:

Stock Issues: The negative can claim that the affirmative does not uphold any of the above burdens. Certain judges believe that the affirmative must uphold each of the issues, or they lose the round. Since the late 1980's, attacks on inherency and significance have fallen out of favor.

Disadvantages: The negative can claim that there are disadvantages, or adverse effects of the plan, which outweigh any advantages claimed. The basic structure of a Disadvantage includes the Uniqueness, or the current situation which indicates that the disadvantage will not occur in the status quo; the links between the plan and the adverse reaction, generally this is a chain of links, with links after the initial link called internal links; and the Impact, which is the terminal effect of the affirmative plan. In order to outweigh any positive effects of the affirmative case, impacts are often unrealistic and exaggerated, exceeding what would be expected as outcomes of a real world policy action.

Kritiks (i.e., Critique): The negative can claim that the affirmative is guilty of a certain mindset or assumption that should be grounds for rejection. Kritiks are sometimes a reason to reject the entire affirmative advocacy without evaluating its policy; othertimes kritiks can be evaluated within the same framework for evaluation as the affirmative case. Examples of some kritiks include ones against biopower, racism, centralized government or anthropocentric viewpoints. Critiques arose in the early 1990's, with the first critiques based in deconstructionist philosophy about the intrinsic ambiguity of language. The affirmative team was forced to prove that language had meaning before their case could be considered.

Counterplans: The negative can reject the status quo in favor of a different policy action, which provides better advantages, or fewer disadvantages than the plan, also known as net benefits. The affirmative team may argue against the competition of the counterplan by permuting the CP, that is adopting some portion of the plan in addition to their plan. A successful permutation may be grounds to remove the CP from consideration, or grounds to narrow the scope of the debate to only the mutually exclusive part of the CP.

Theory: Sometimes the subject matter of the affirmative's case will create an uneven playing field from the beginning. In these cases, the negative can resort to making objections as to the procedure or content of the affirmative case. These objections often are "theoretical" in that they try to make objections based upon what bad can/has come to debate from the infraction, or what would make debate better if it were true.

Narrative: Narratives are emotionally delivered speeches generally given at the opening of a speech. They are usually personal in nature, and call for the judge to approve of a specific policy option based on a situation. A case that would solve for world hunger might include a narrative about a starving African child. This technique was introduced subsequent to 1998.

Performance: A song, dance, or other method of expression other than rhetoric that is used in the round, usually with justification. For example, a dance about freedom may better represent freedom than actual discourse. This technique was introduced subsequent to 1998.

Evidence

Evidence in debates is organized into units called cards. Cards are designed to condense an author's argument so that debaters have an easy way to access the information. A card is composed of three parts: the tag, the cite, and the body. The tag is the debater's summary of the argument presented in the body. A tag is usually only one or two sentences. The cite contains all relevant citation information (that is, the author, date of publication, journal, title, etc.). Although every card should contain a complete citation, only the author's name and date of publication are typically spoken aloud in a speech. Some teams will also read the author's qualifications if they wish to emphasize this information. The body is a fragment of the author's original text. The length of a body can vary greatly—cards can be as short as a few sentences and as long as two or more pages. Most cards are between one and five paragraphs in length. The body of a card is often underlined or highlighted in order to eliminate unnecessary or redundant sentences when the card is read in a round. In a round, the tag is read first, followed by the cite and the body.

As pieces of evidence accumulate use, multiple colors of highlighting and different thicknesses of underlining often acrue, sometimes making it difficult to determine which portion of the evidence was read. If debaters stop before finishing the underlined or highlighted portion of a card, it is considered good form to "mark" the card to show where one stopped reading. To otherwise misrepresent how much of a card was read—either by stopping early or by skipping underlined or highlighted sections—is known as "cross-reading" which is generally considered cheating. Although many judges overtly condemn the practice on their paradigms, it is hard to enforce, especially if judges permit debaters to be excessively unclear. Opponents will generally stand behind a debater whom they believe to be "cross-reading", as if waiting to take a card (see below), and silently read along with them in an attempt to get their opponent to stop or the judge to notice.

As cards are read in round, it is common for an opponent to collect and examine even while a speach is still going on. This practice originated in part because cards are read at a rate faster than conversational speed but also because the un-underlined portion of cards is not read in round. Taking the cards during the speach allows the opponent to question the author's qualifications, the original context of the evidence, etc. in cross-examination. It is generally accepted whichever team is using preparation time has priority to read evidence read previously during a round by both teams. As a result, large amounts of evidence may change hands after the use of preparation time but before a speech. Most judges will not deduct from a team's preparation time for time spent finding evidence which the other team has misplaced.

After a round, judges often "call for cards" to examine evidence whose merit was contested during the round or whose weight was emphasized during rebuttals so that they can read the evidence for themselves. Although widespread, this practice is explicitly banned at some tournaments, most notably National Catholic Forensic League naitonals and some judges refuse to call for cards because they believe the practice constitutes "doing work for debaters that should have been done during round". Judges may also call for evidence for the purpose of obtaining its citation information so that they can produce the evidence for their own school. Opponents and spectators are also generally allowed to collect citations in this manner and some tournaments send scouts to rounds to facilitate the collection of cites for every team at the tournament, information which is sometimes published online.

Sample card

US hegemony is key to preventing proliferation and global nuclear war.

Khalilzad, 95 (Zalmay, [director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program @ RAND & current US Ambassador to Afghanistan] "Losing the Moment? The United States and the World After the Cold War," Washington Quarterly, Spring, p. proquest)

Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.

Judging

Judging policy debate can be challenging. The total time available is short, the issues are complex and the judge may have personal beliefs that cloud impartiality.

Judge qualifications

Some circuits see lay or inexperienced judges recruited from the community as an important "part of the game." Debaters in these circuits must be able to adapt from presentations to individuals with no debate experience at all, to judges who have themselves been debaters. This use of lay judges significantly impacts delivery and argumentation as the rapid-fire style and complex debate-theory arguments are frequently incomprehensible to lay judges. For this reason, other circuits restrict policy debate judging to qualified judges, generally ex-debaters. The use of lay judges, and its impact in speed, presentation and argumentation is a source of great controversy in the US high school debate community. See the following for recent reviews of the issue.

Template:Journal reference available at [3]
Template:Journal reference available at [4]

Paradigms

Experienced debate judges (who were generally debaters in High School and/or College) generally carry a mindset that favors certain arguments and styles over others. Throughout time, the criterion upon which judges decide debates has changed. Currently increasingly popular within college debate, and trickling down into high school debate, is examining debate from an "offense-defense" paradigm. Because of this, it is customary for debaters to ask a judge what their experience and paradigm is for judging.

Competition and debate life

Tournaments

Most high school debaters debate in local tournaments in their city, state or nearby states. Hundreds of such tournaments are held at high schools throughout the US each weekend during the debate season.

A small subset of high school debaters, mostly from elite public and private schools, travel around the country to tournaments in what is called the 'national circuit.' Major national circuit tournaments include the Glenbrooks at Glenbrook North and Glenbrook South High Schools in North Shore, Chicago, the Barkeley Forum at Emory University, and the Heart of Texas tournament at St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas.

Championships

High school

The high school debate tournament generally considered to be the national circuit championship is the Tournament of Champions held at the University of Kentucky.
For non-national circuit debaters the national championship is generally considered to be the national tournament of their sponsoring organization, either
- the National Speech and Debate Tournament of the National Forensic League or
- the Grand National Tournament of the National Catholic Forensic League.

College

There is no single unified national championship in college debate; the National Debate Tournament (NDT), the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) and the American Debate Association (ADA) all host national tournaments.

Institutes

Highly competitive debaters often attend summer institutes ranging from one or two weeks to two or more months. Institutes exist at Dartmouth, Northwestern, the University of Kentucky, the University of North Texas, Michigan State University, University of Texas - Austin, and the University of Michigan, amongst others.

Resolutions

A resolution or topic is a normative statement which the affirmative team affirms and the negative team negates. Resolutions are selected annually by affiliated schools.

All resolutions (since the 1920s) begin "Resolved: The United States federal government should".

At the college level, a number of topics are proposed and interested parties write 'topic papers' discussing the pros and cons of that individual topic. Each school then gets one vote on the topic. The single topic area voted on then has a number of proposed topic wordings, one is chosen, and it is debated by affiliated students nationally for the entire season.

Event structure

In all forms of policy debate the order of speeches is as follows:

Speech	Time (high school)	Time (college)
First Affirmative Constructive (1AC)	8 minutes	9 minutes
Cross-examination of First Affirmative by Second Negative	3 minutes	3 minutes
First Negative Constructive (1NC)	8 minutes	9 minutes
Cross-examination of First Negative by First Affirmative	3 minutes	3 minutes
Second Affirmative Constructive (2AC)	8 minutes	9 minutes
Cross-examination of Second Affirmative by First Negative	3 minutes	3 minutes
Second Negative Constructive (2NC)	8 minutes	9 minutes
Cross-examination of Second Negative by Second Affirmative	3 minutes	3 minutes
First Negative Rebuttal (1NR)	5 minutes	6 minutes
First Affirmative Rebuttal (1AR)	5 minutes	6 minutes
Second Negative Rebuttal (2NR)	5 minutes	6 minutes
Second Affirmative Rebuttal (2AR)	5 minutes	6 minutes

In addition to speeches, policy debates may allow for a certain amount of preparation time, or "prep time," during a debate round. NFL rules call for 5 minutes of total prep time that can be used, although in practice high school debate tournaments give 8 minutes of prep time. College debates typically have 10 minutes of preparation time. The preparation time is used at each team's preference; they can use different amounts of preparation time before any of their speeches, or even none at all. Prep time can be allocated strategically to intimidate or inconvenience the other team: for instance, normally a 1AR requires substantial prep time, so a well-executed "stand up 1AR", delivered after no prep time intimidates the negative team and takes away from time that the 2NR may have used to prepare the parts of her speech which do not rely on what the 1AR says.

The format of NFA-LD varies from the format of team policy debate.

References

Cheshire, David. (2002). Drills to Improve your Debate Speaking. Rostrum. Retrieved December 30, 2005.
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External links

High school debate websites

College debate websites

Other