Part Three: basically every politics motion boils down to the two sides of these divides
Compared to the past two articles, this one is going to be a doozy. Sorry for that, but this really is the heart of any debater’s education on politics motions, as the only article focused on the motions themselves. So, buckle up and be prepared to break this one down in multiple sittings; if it helps to know, 1) is by far the longest segment, while 2) and 3) are relatively brief.
Motions typically present an either/or divide: should we do this or that to solve a problem? While debates can get more complicated for that, practically every politics motion comes down to one of three things:
Should political actors position towards the extremes or the centre?
Is authenticity better?
Democracy: is it good?
Most other politics motions are about how to navigate a specific situation, typically an actor debate, and/or one with an infoslide and setting of a specific country. Even then, many of of those draw on one of the above motion formats for inspiration.
Let’s talk through each of these.
is the most common kind of politics motion you will see.
“Actor”, if you’re not familiar with this use of the word, refers to a key individual, group, or institution whose actions are impactful. Actor debates force both teams to debate from the perspective of an actor, including explaining what they care about; most debates are, instead, from the perspective of what’s good for a country or just a good idea in general. THS Three Waters, for instance, is a debate about whether that policy would improve or harm New Zealanders’ quality of life. By political actors, I mean politicians, movements, parties and the like; so, a THS Three Waters debate includes political actors such as Labour Party, local iwi, and Stop Co-Governance.
“Politics” is getting power to get stuff done. There are many dimensions to that. As debates are usually set in New Zealand or across the West, this usually looks like winning elections and running a government in a democracy. You’re thinking about persuading voters, maintaining party discipline, forming coalitions and parliamentary blocs, executing policies through ministries, cultivating donors, appeasing lobby groups like industry sectors and unions…a whole lot of things! (Authoritarian regimes boil down to a) dealing with threats to power and b) whatever weird pet project/actually good policy direction the chief picks.)
The question at the heart of this is simple: do you take a moderate or a radical approach? (Of course, in reality, most political actors will sit somewhere between the two; I’m simplifying the divide down to make this easier). Worth noting: “Radical” and “extreme” often have particular connotations of being beyond the pale, anti-democratic and potentially even violent. That's not my meaning in using them here. I simply mean “moderate” as “do some stuff” and “radical” as “do more stuff”. Perhaps in some exceedingly rare cases “do more stuff” includes “firebomb a Kmart”, but this is mainly about what political positions and branding parties should adopt.
A moderate approach looks like a) compromising with other actors’ goals, which means looking at everything you would ideally like to do and discarding some of it, and b) limiting yourself within the Overton window of the status quo. A radical approach includes a) refusing to compromise on ambitious red lines, and b) actively searching for options outside of the Overton window.
The Overton window is the acceptable options for actors and stakeholders - voters, politicians etc. Think of an endless wall, painted with all the policies possible. There may be infinite choices, but when you look through that window, you’re only able to choose from the options that you can see on the wall. ‘Raise pay for nurses’ or ‘Limit immigration’ sit within the Overton window. ‘Legalise and tax methamphetamine’ or ‘Institute a one child policy’, to use a dash of hyperbole, do not. You’ll have to go outside the Overton window to size up those. (More practical examples of ideas outside the Overton window in our politics currently include implementing a wealth tax or legislating a new set of principles of Te Tiriti.)
Remember Part Two of this series, where I mentioned a small target case beating a big target case? Let’s build that idea out! I’m going to use the analogy of "Who's the beatdown?", a discussion which originates with the Magic: The Gathering community in the 90s, but which has broad applications in game theory. You can put this concept to use in any head-to-head, zero-sum competition, and, happily enough, debating perfectly fits that definition.
“Who’s the beatdown?” insists on the strategic importance of identifying one critical goal. Each side must figure out whether they're trying to win by challenging themselves more, to construct something practically unbeatable if it all comes together, or less, in the hopes that points on the board are worth more than the opponent's unrealised ambitions. Or, put another way, you should know whether you’re fighting a Blitzkrieg or a Great Patriotic War.
This is useful in all debates, but an especially relevant idea for understanding politics debates. A moderate approach is the beatdown deck. (I’m not using this terminology in the original context where the beatdown deck is time-scarce and the control deck time-rich. On the contrary, moderate approaches usually emphasise the value of bedding in change slowly over a long period, while radicals typically try to move fast and break things.)
A moderate approach posits that perfection is unlikely and should be sacrificed as a goal. The approach avoids the added challenges of stepping outside the Overton window. All of this is in order to maximise the likelihood that some positive changes can be ensured, guaranteeing a better position than a radical’s worst-case scenario - which is overreaching and getting no change at all, or even negative change. $5 is less than $10, but if you can choose between a 50% chance of getting $5 or a 10% chance of getting $10, you pick the $5 coinflip!
A great example of this is “New Labour” in the UK (not to be confused with Jim Anderton’s leftie NewLabour). The British Labour Party has a horrible track record of winning elections and getting results. Since Clement Attlee’s enormously impressive run of government in the second half of the 40s, best known for the National Health Service (i.e universal healthcare), they got very little done, they kept losing elections, and they became known as anti-British radicals.
As an example, Labour’s promises in 1983 were chock-full of ideas outside of the Overton window, like scrapping all of Britain's nukes, renationalising (state takeover of) industries, and a Brexit. In the view of figures like Tony Blair, who came to lead the Labour Party in the 90s, they could not promise everything they might want and also expect to get into power to do anything they wanted.
Blair relentlessly pursued a moderating approach known as “New Labour”, pushing the party towards the centre. Political positioning is often visualised as a spectrum, where the left tends to prefer taxing more, spending more, and a more liberal society, while the right tends to prefer taxing less, spending less, and a more conservative society. The centre sits between these and, in the West, typically looks like not being too hostile either to business and the like or to vulnerable groups and social minorities. This is a simplification, and, yes, if you know the political compass, it can be a useful tool to expand your thinking, but left = Labour/Greens and right = National/ACT is where we are at in a nutshell. (TPM and NZFirst are messy. TPM currently sits with the left bloc and NZFirst is…somehow centre and hard-right at the same time, they’re weird).
Blair stripped ideas out of the Labour manifesto widely seen as too left-wing; he courted sectors like businesses and the Murdoch news empire that were traditionally hostile to Labour; and he constantly advertised himself as a new, fresh face compared to Labour’s left-wing roots, with much in common with the right-wing ruling Conservatives. His push towards the centre got incredible results. Tony Blair remains the only Labour leader to win a national election in the United Kingdom in the past half century. He won three landslides, and having far more MPs than the Conservatives, Labour could safely pass plenty of policies: amongst other left-wing priorities, introducing a UK wide minimum wage, raising healthcare and education spending.
That’s the case for the moderate approach. By extending Labour’s appeal beyond the core of the party, to give others who didn’t agree with Labour on everything reasons to support or at least not inhibit Labour, Labour could get more votes and remove roadblocks to their actions. That made the difference so that they would have enough votes to win elections, enough MPs to get policies passed, and a large enough majority to provide a safety buffer against any unforeseen challenges.
There are lots of mechs you can use if your side of a debate requires a moderate approach (e.g TH, as the UK Labour Party, would increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP), but the most important one is simple: swing voters. Most voters, whatever they say, stick with one party no matter what, or at least on their side of the political “aisle”, because the left and right fundamentally disagree on most things and, if you lean left or right, it’ll be hard to find a time the “opposite” party agrees with you more than your own. Labour’s base of Labour voters show up and vote Labour every election. Say for argument’s sake that 40% of voters will always vote Labour and 45% will always vote conservative. The 15% of the population left who swing between parties - swing voters - will decide every election.
Swing voters are typically middle-upper income, highly educated, hold a wide range of views, and otherwise tick all the demographic boxes for the kinds of people who are very likely to show up and vote every election. Here is the most recent data on what the average New Zealand swing voter looks like. Swing voters are usually moderate centrists but plenty of swing voters have more eclectic views.
Every swing voter you can persuade to come to you takes one away from a party opposing you. That is twice as efficient for winning an election as is getting a voter who’d never vote Tory to go from not voting or wasting their vote to voting for you. If Labour have won 9 votes and the Conservatives have won 10 votes, Labour winning away a swing voter creates a 10-9 result. Labour simply turning out one more voter who wasn't voting Conservative only gets them to 10-10. This is your path to measurable benefits: the most reliable way to get into power. Almost everywhere, especially at the national level, holding power is 95% of the ability to make change.
A government in New Zealand controls all of the ministries, all of the tax revenue, proposes and passes practically all of the laws, and is privy to information. When everybody who’s somebody wants to exert influence, they come to the government. An opposition can campaign against the government’s changes and in favour of different ones, and then it’s up to the government to decide what to do with that information. Change is usually only stopped or altered when an opposition can get a lot of the public to care, and the government isn’t willing to risk losing that many voters, particularly swing voters. As a final note here, in some countries like the US, opposition parties have a lot more power to filibuster or otherwise interfere with the government. We’ll circle back to that under 3).
How can a moderate approach apply in all sorts of debates? If you’re debating whether to campaign for or implement more radical policies, you can neg with the whole “we have to remove obstacles to getting elected and passing policies; aff can’t deliver any benefits; we can because here’s what policies we still do”. For instance, if you’re arguing from the perspective of Democrats in the US (Joe Biden’s party), you can make the case that Medicare for All (i.e universal, government-run health insurance) would alienate moderate voters afraid of perceived socialism and the huge insurance industry, which donates lots to political campaigns.
An election campaign run on Medicare for All would lose and no progress on healthcare would be made; indeed, the Republicans (Trump’s party) might implement policies that actively hurt healthcare provision. Instead, a public option, which would offer government-run health insurance for some people even as most would stick with their private (i.e company-run) options, could ameliorate those fears, making the difference in winning the presidency and Congress to then add that public option and improve healthcare.
If you’re talking about compromise, like forming coalition agreements or honestly admitting in your speech that you probably won’t get x thing, you can explain how, through the transactional nature of politics, you get y in return for that. Weight why y is more impactful than x. So, for instance, when NZFirst agreed to a coalition government in Labour, they compromised on some of their policies: for one, they dropped their demand that the Port of Auckland be moved to Northport, near Whangārei, Northland. In return, they got to be in government and secure $3 billion for their Provincial Growth Fund.
If I’m arguing for NZFirst’s interests in a debate, I can sell this compromise as a positive impact. Using PGF money to build a racetrack in Riccarton may be daft policy, but that makes donors in the racing industry happy, so they’ll help us afford to run ads to get reelected next time. Moving the Port to Northland, on the other hand, is a moronic idea and it does nothing to further our interests. So we should embrace that compromise on doing everything that made it into our party manifesto in order to secure power that’s more useful to us!
Changes run into a lot of opposition. They can actually end up hurting more than helping the goal of change. For instance, pushing for social progress and doing a botch job of it can only inflame opposition and set you back. The cannabis referendum here has killed any chance of Parliament passing a law to legalise cannabis in the medium term. The Voice referendum in Australia divided indigenous voters and groups on whether to back Yes or No, and inflamed racism from people across the country.
Yet New Labour faced challenges, too. Those on the left grew increasingly agitated that the Labour government wasn’t changing enough, leaving too many people struggling in poverty and with other challenges. Indeed, in some cases New Labour advanced a right-wing agenda, privatising parts of public services and introducing tuition fees. (Most notably, the UK joined the US in invading Iraq. The technical term for this in the historian community is “a bit of a boo-boo”.)
New Labour won landslide after landslide, but what the government stood for became increasingly unclear. In many ways, though the Conservatives kept losing elections, they had already won the policy battle before Labour ever took government. By setting the Overton window in quite a, well, conservative place, a Labour Party confining themselves to compromising with a centre-right nation and picking from the options the Conservatives had made acceptable were doing the Conservatives’ job. The pursuit of power to make changes sacrificed change. (If you wish to name any possible relevance in any of these comparisons to a certain other Anglosphere Labour Party of recent years, you can be my guest.)
What, instead, does a radical approach offer? Radicalism is hostile to the status quo, which is seen as unacceptable and defended by an establishment. The left usually sees this as business and conservative bastions like religious institutions, the right as the media, universities and public service. To radicals, the status quo is a) too big a problem to address with small changes and b) too strong at corrupting any force that tries to work within its boundaries.
Radicalism hopes to change what is and isn’t acceptable, remaking the rules of the game rather than playing by them. Take FDR, who came to power in the USA in 1933. Faced with the Great Depression - a shrinking economy, sky-high unemployment and the Dust Bowl choking agriculture - he enacted ambitious changes, such as creating countless jobs on public works, setting up the Tennessee Valley Authority to transform power and agriculture development, and establishing Social Security (their version of superannuation). Many of these big changes became the new norm; abolishing Social Security lies outside the Overton window to this day.
Yet you might note that I’ve glossed over the actually getting to power part.A moderate party will pretty much always be honest with the general public that they’re moderate. Maybe they try to point to their biggest ambitions with core party groups, but, overall, moderation is crafted to appeal to those outside your party; there’s no sense in claiming to potential voters you’re not on the same page as them.
A radical party, however, faces a choice. They can pass themselves off as nothing out of the ordinary, then get radical while in power. Sometimes, that goes smoothly. Often, though, this leads to accusations of deceiving the public over a hidden. Bill Clinton, for instance, won the White House in 1992 campaigning as a moderate, but his Democrats spent the next two years trying to pass markedly more left-wing policies like universal healthcare. This led to Democrats losing an election in 1994. A chastened Clinton governed as a moderate for the rest of his presidency.
Never underestimate the utility in a debate of saying “you can just lie”, but this pathway comes with serious risks. By disavowing the radicals while betraying the moderates, you risk burning the candle of your support at both ends. Moreover, even if you’re not outright lying, ambiguity can be the death of you. In the last weeks of the 2017 election, after Jacindamania’s high ebb, National hammered Labour over their unclear position on taxes. Labour lost voters back to National, who ended up with the most votes and a near-victory.
The more common alternative, then, is to openly embrace the reputation and be honest that the plan is radical. Radicals and moderates will always argue about this, but the generally agreed upon conclusion (that I side with) is that it’s harder to win elections and to reach high levels of support with a radical approach. Remember our swing voter logic from earlier? A radical approach is all about saying “we want to do as much as possible of our left/right-wing agenda, not compromise on what other groups would prefer”, and that makes it harder to reach swing voters/business/unions et cetera.
The radical argument is that you can outweigh the loss of swing voters with the gain in other groups of voters. Not everybody votes in every election. Radicals generally argue around increasing voter turnout for their party. By defining what they stand for clearly and providing appetising offerings without compromises that put off the faithful they can make sure that everybody likely to be loyal to them, rather than their opponents, shows up and votes, or energise groups who usually wouldn’t vote at all. (You can also extend this with mechanisms about how energised voters are likelier to donate for you, volunteer to call voters or knock doors and so on.)
As an aside, when debating cases take one side of the political aisle, it’s usually the left (i.e tax more, spend more, socially more progressive) rather than the right (i.e tax less, spend less, socially more conservative). More young people, particularly at university, lean left than right, it’s a lot easier to explain “the government does x and then y happens” than “the government stops doing x thing, so a does b thing, so y happens”, and motions that explicitly concern one side usually pick progressives over conservatives.
However, radical turnout arguments are far more frequently used by the left than the right. This is because demographics who don't or rarely vote typically skew left-wing: young people, poor and working-class people, ethnic minorities…generally, then, right-wing parties want lower turnout and left-wing parties want higher turnout at elections.
The radical left-wing turnout argument typically centres on the idea that centre-left parties are too willing to bend to businesses and rich people who don’t want to be taxed or regulated more, and that the working class and students will be inspired by bold policies to tax the rich and massively increase investment in public services. Wealth taxes and capital gains taxes are common examples of this in NZ politics; the Green New Deal and Medicare for All are the leading examples from the United States.
Two notes, then, to conclude this segment. The first is that this is messier to define in the modern political era. Populist right-wing leaders around the world, such as Donald Trump, have gotten a lot better at appealing to people who usually don’t vote. The core of this is education: increasingly, voters with fewer years of education are likelier to favour right-wing parties. There’s also some weirdness going on in many European countries where youth are tilting sharply towards the right. This wave hasn't really arrived in New Zealand - our populist parties, ACT and NZFirst, still appeal to fairly typical right-wing demographics (older and, in ACT's case, richer) - but keep in mind that, in many overseas countries, radical turnout arguments absolutely can be made for right-wing parties.
The second is that there is still a conventional radical right-wing turnout argument. This flips the script: instead of arguing that they need to turn out people who usually do not vote, the case is that people who almost always do vote will stay home in protest if they are not sated - or even defect to another, more radical party on the same side of the aisle. (Left-wingers can threaten to do this but, because of the nature of a) doubt whether they’ll show up to vote in the first place and b) tending to be less connected to the establishment or “respectable” by status quo norms - think anarchists versus evangelicals - it tends to be less effective.)
Two examples to illustrate the flipped turnout argument. One, a few years ago the National Party supported Labour’s MDRS: a moderate, bipartisan policy to allow more apartment blocks to be built. NIMBYs - generally older homeowners who reliably appear at council meetings, make submissions and vote - protested this vociferously, and ACT, a more radical party than National, made hay on the issue, until National gave in and backed out of the MDRS to ensure that those NIMBYs would show up to vote, and vote for them, in 2023. The YIMBYs, who skew towards all those low-turnout demographics (think us students and young workers and professionals who don’t own houses), are less likely to vote, we’re less likely to vote for right-wing parties in particular, and we’re less likely to base who we vote for off of housing policy.
Two, over in the UK right now Reform - formerly the Brexit Party, founded by hard-right demagogue Nigel Farage - is surging in the polls. They are doing so in large part by hammering the idea that the right-wing Conservative Party in government is letting too many immigrants and refugees. Accordingly, the government are pushing their Rwanda Plan, a radical response to high migration flows threatening to deport new arrivals over to Rwanda. By acting more radical, they hope to capture back those voters defecting to Reform who will instead show up for them, even if they lose some swing voters alienated by the plan.
If you want to use a radical argument, then, it’s all about going outside the Overton Window. By presenting unprecedented change to disengaged groups rather than more of the same, you can turn them out to win elections and pressure opposing parties into giving way. Once in government, it's not that complicated: you can promise to do more than the other team simply by having the mandate to do more; politicians had better get on board or risk losing their jobs at the next election when voters turf them out.
You can also get into how, if your approach is radical, you necessarily back unconventional approaches. For instance, rather than just winning parliamentary votes, you can threaten to pack the judiciary with judges who will rule in favour of your policies. (Be careful here - it may backfire if the other side can accuse you of weakening democracy or otherwise putting dangerous tools in the hands of the next government!)
One last note: these arguments are focused on debates about who will lead the next government out of the two largest parties - for instance, in New Zealand, that’s Labour (centre-left) and National (centre-right). The last three governments in New Zealand have been moderate, not radical, in nature; jury’s out on this one. However, minor parties usually aren’t angling to lead the next government, only to play a part in influencing it - whether it’s as a junior (smaller) partner in an agreement to govern together, or by forcing the major party towards their policy positions to compete for their voters.
Some minor parties are very moderate and some are very radical. NZFirst, while hardly known for their extreme chill at all times, has historically defined themselves by their willingness to work with either of the major parties (the recent election being a rare exception to the rule). The argument for moderation as a minor party is that, because you’re acceptable to both major parties as you’re willing to compromise with their core policy priorities, you have a lot of leverage in negotiations over which side you should form a government with, if both sides need you. This is how Winston Peters gets to be Foreign Minister and funnel billions into the PGF and what not every so often, even though only around one in fifteen Kiwis vote for him on a good day. Of course, the argument against then becomes what good is all this; what’s NZFirst’s lasting positive impact?
ACT, on the other hand, define themselves clearly as more right-wing than National. The argument against this radicalism is that they miss out on any coalition with Labour et al, who aren’t willing to consider the idea, and more broadly they can only influence parties on the right side of the aisle. However, by staking out bold demands, National had to come towards them on matters like the MDRS and accept policies they’d never promote themselves in the coalition agreement, like reviewing Treaty principles. In a sense, then, a radical approach can lead to more favourable compromises than a moderate, compromiser approach - you just have to make sure you’re not so radical as to blow up any chance of a compromise, as almost happened when ACT started threatening no coalition with National, either, during the election, and bled votes as a result.
To recap, then, most political motions represent a divide between whether to try to do more or not as much. Trying to do more ideally leads to the biggest benefit by overcoming existing limits. Trying to do not as much is a safer, more reliable approach to ensure at least something gets done rather than nothing at all. Left-wing parties tend to favour a radical approach while the centre and right prefer a moderate one, but you can make any argument from any angle if you think this through.
Debating authenticity in representation is the next most common kind of politics motion. Compared to 1), which sometimes appears in motions about how parties should campaign or structure themselves but also often manifests in policy debates, 2) almost always appears in motions that concern how a party or individual politicians should sell themselves.
This is much simpler than 1), as policy matters are usually irrelevant or very secondary. Just about all you're talking about is what gives candidates the best chance of entering races and winning, and what kinds of candidates it’s best to have in office. There are two subtypes to this: the first compares two different groups and asks which is better to have represented more, and the second asks whether authenticity is better or worse than concealing the truth.
The first kind appears through motions such as “THBT leftist political parties in developing democracies should prioritise running ordinary working class citizens over career politicians from established political families in elections”. In this case, you’re looking at two questions: firstly, is an authentic, working class candidate likelier to win an election than a career politician who is not as in touch with people, but more capable at handling the veneers of politics? Secondly, which will deliver more for people once they’ve won the election?
This really gets at the heart of how critical demographics are to electioneering. As I mentioned earlier with my low turnout versus high turnout demographics, politicians and campaigns do not treat all voters equally. Different groups will tend to respond differently to different appeals, and as all people are members of many different groups, there’s a lot of ways you can slice this.
One key relationship between politicians and demographics is assessing which politician backgrounds appeal to which voters. There’s the straightforward angle here: people will be likelier to vote for somebody who shares a background with them. However, this shouldn’t be overstated. Voting for somebody who shares a culture or ethnicity with you is a strong predictive factor in more ethnically divided democracies, which tend to be located in regions like West Africa where not many people see much benefit in the country as a whole, and instead identify with their nation (tribe, culture, region or so on).
By contrast, in many stabler and more successful countries, people trust that whichever politician is in charge, they won’t only try to funnel benefits to their ethnic group. The concept breaks down even more when you look at other groups. It’s fair play to argue governments dominated by men often don’t think about women’s needs, but it’d be absurd to argue that, say, a woman politician would govern only for women and not for men. Did wāhine Māori rush to vote for Hannah Tamaki over Chris or Chris in droves? Of course not! As always, a basic sense check goes a long way.
However, ethnic groups of voters can still sharply cleave for one party or another. In the US, only about one in ten black voters vote Republican; the other nine vote Democrat. This is heavily simplifying, but in the West, the general trend is that ethnic minorities lean considerably to the left and whites lean slightly to the right. In New Zealand, for instance, most Māori voters typically vote Labour or TPM, whereas if you averaged out all of New Zealand’s elections, more Pākehā have voted right than left.
Accordingly, which candidates you nominate will also be a question about who reflects or “rewards” the support of certain groups. New Zealand’s Labour Party, for one, has been plagued by the perception that they take Māori votes without elevating Māori talent in their ranks. So, politician identities tend to be a moderately strong determinant of whose votes they get, but whose votes parties get can also be a weak factor in which candidates they select.
As for competence in government, this can apply in a few different ways. Most directly, you can argue for how the qualifications and experience of a candidate applies. In a conventional sense, this looks like, for instance, career politicians being groomed to lead or highly educated candidates grasping complex policy issues.
However, unconventionally, we’re also talking about how somebody’s personal experiences feed into the policies they push for. Matt Doocey, our Mental Health Minister, speaks from experience with trauma and depression that most politicians don’t have. A government composed entirely of cis men likely wouldn’t think to design and implement a law extending ACC coverage for traumatic birth injuries, as the last Labour Government, composed of mostly women, did.
Competence from a politician doesn’t just look like policy work, either; it’s also about, well, political competency. A member of an established political family comes with the connections and clout to twist arms and get bills passed. David Shearer came into politics with a wealth of experience helping some of the most vulnerable people in the world overseas, but as leader of the Labour Party he floundered because none of that made him a good fit for politics.
As always, keep thinking about these concepts: a party having a good plan to run things is no use if they cannot win power; a party with power is no use if they haven’t got a good plan to use it. A good case for a politics motion to do with a party getting elected or governing should have two points that establish, one, how power will be won unlike on the other side, and two, how it will be used better than the alternative.
The second kind appears with motions like “THBT women running for political positions should not emphasise their gender in their campaigns”. This is a reframing of the same ideas as above: is a candidate better if they are truest to humanity or downplay the significance of that humanity? The difference is, of course, the first type directly pits one type of candidate versus another head to head; the second type has both sides arguing about the same candidates, it’s just about how they should campaign differently.
This is where we get into the complexities of campaigning, deeper than the basic take of “voters like candidates like them”. What background a voter comes from opens up some pathways and closes others on how they can campaign. A rich candidate can promote themselves as good at making money, and attract those who want to see themselves in the dream; a candidate of modest means and from a poor family can empathise with those struggling to get by.
Jacinda Ardern came in not just as a woman, but as a woman whose message was kindness. She was able to convincingly sell herself to left-leaning women who saw themselves more in that politics than in her predecessors, who were not just men but had campaigned on the image of the ordinary Kiwi bloke who D.I.Ys their roof. Boris Johnson, on the other hand, is an example of a politician who played against type for their background instead of leaning into stereotypes: despite his upper class and erudite background, he acted the part of the blithering buffoon and the lovable scamp, an Etonian everyman.
Of course, there is one other sharp downside involved in politicians’ backgrounds, and that’s that voters and other actors can hold or spread bias or bigotry against candidates based on their background. The “Bradley effect” is just one of many examples of this: the idea that white Californians in 1982 were afraid to say to pollsters that they wouldn't vote for Tom Bradley, the black candidate, producing polls that put Bradley ahead and a shock when he lost on the night.
For what it’s worth, I think this theory, like the “shy Trump voter” theory, is probably bunk and misunderstands polling, but it’s meant to illustrate the fact that, as on so many matters, voters are not perfectly rational and respectable machines: we make stupid and negative choices, and sometimes those choices are born out of conscious or subconscious racism, sexism or so on. Candidates cannot choose their background, and so debates about which types of candidates to run can discuss which are bound to face more challenges.
Candidates can, however, choose how they campaign. Do they lean into their identity, and try to turn out those who view that favourably? This doesn’t just have to be voters part of that group. White liberals are drawn to opportunities to make history by electing the first person of a given background to a higher office. Or do they try to conceal that and appeal to the majority or the dominant narrative? Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s black senator, ran ads in a sweater vest walking his dog around the suburbs to appear “less threatening” and win the votes of racist whites.
There are all sorts of sublayers to this you can get into. Should a female candidate lean into being a mother or a breadwinner? Which side of their heritage should biracial candidates emphasise? (I guarantee you the average American does not know Kamala Harris is Indian American.) And all of this filters into what they can then get done in government, based on the popular mandate they come into power with and the narratives they can continue making their case through.
A government full of women who got elected emphasising their feminism and bodily autonomy can then parlay that into legalising abortion, but so can a government full of Catholics who got elected emphasising their faith-based background and grounding in traditional values, who can then use that identity to shield themselves against religious critiques. There is lots to work with here! You can spin a point any way you like: the important thing is just to make sure your team does characterisation work early and refers back to this often.
Democracy: is it good?
I’m exaggerating for effect. It’s very rare you will be in a debate where you have to outright argue for non-democratic forms of government, but let’s do a quick rundown on those as well. These generally take one of the following forms.
Dictatorship: one person rules all, sometimes after winning democratic elections and then turning the country into a dictatorship (e.g Putin in Russia), sometimes after a military coup installs them (e.g Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe), sometimes after winning a civil war or revolution (e.g Kagame in Rwanda) and sometimes after inheriting power (e.g Nguema in Equatorial Guinea). The arguments for these leaders focus on getting lots of stuff done quickly (e.g purging corrupt officials) without democracy getting in the way; the arguments against focus on how dictators tend to kill and oppress a lot of people and can be erratic and go unchecked. Most often appears across Central America, West and Central Africa, and Central Asia.
Military junta: the same idea of “force gets you into power”, but a cabal of military leaders govern together instead (e.g the State Administration Council in Myanmar). Similar concepts of get stuff done at play here, but military juntas are more likely than dictatorships to hand power back to civilians after a couple of years; the argument against them is that military experience typically makes you unqualified to lead and inexperienced at governance, and that a coup culture cultivates instability - if a commander pulls off a coup, why shouldn’t the next commander try their luck? Most often appears across West Africa; historically common in South America. Thailand and Turkey are other high-profile countries notable for their coup culture.
One-party state: a party has authoritarian control over society and politics, rather than being simply a vessel for their leader (e.g PAP in Singapore; kind of the CCP in China, though Xi Jinping has followed the tradition of Mao Zedong in vesting power back into himself as dictator - the CCP in Vietnam is a better example). These provide a lot of continuity and long-term direction for a country, but the argument against one-party states is that, like communist parties across Eastern Europe and beyond in the second half of the 20th century, they gradually end up stifling talent and new ideas in favour of directionless self-preservation. Most common in Southeast Asia.
Hybrid state: the governing regime could lose power democratically if they really flubbed an election, but they’ve stacked the deck in their favour (e.g Erdoğan in Turkey; Orban in Hungary); often a stop-off point on the path to dictatorship. Arguments for these are that a hybrid state is considerably less oppressive than outright authoritarian examples and still take in some democratic input from the people, arguments against are that they’re a worst of both worlds where they clearly erode democracy without having complete freedom of action to get stuff done. Commonly found in all these regions I’ve mentioned that are most susceptible to authoritarianism.
Absolute monarchy: unlike our symbolic monarch in the Commonwealth, here the royal - and usually the royal family, by extension - controls all (e.g the Saud royal family in Saudi Arabia). In many ways the arguments here are similar to dictators: you’re really rolling the dice on taking random leaders and seeing whether they get more good or bad done with their oppressive powers, but the difference is here you have an entire family invested in the success of the regime who can be dispersed across powerful positions, and there’s an added layer of veneration and admiration for them that can provide stability but also suppress criticisms and dial up distorting propaganda. Most common across the Middle East.
Theocracy: this is where it gets really weird. Theocracies were a rare breed even historically and are extremely idiosyncratic today. They are states explicitly run on religious lines. Vatican City (i.e the Pope’s home; basically a novelty in the world), Iran and Afghanistan are the three clear box-tickers here - Iran is governed by a supreme religious leader, and Afghanistan has fallen again to the Taliban, a fundamentalist faction - but many states across the Islamic world, especially the monarchies, have significant theocratic traits in their implementation of sharia law. Arguments for are that they are in tune with what their conservative population wants and therefore promote stability; arguments against…there’s a lot. Oppression, the internal opposition of liberals, the dangers of decisions guided by blind faith rather than material facts - generally, wherever possible, avoid picking theocracy as the hill to die on.
These broadly cover almost every authoritarian regime you will see, though never underestimate the ability of a despot to get exceptionally weird and freaky with it. It’s also worth noting that some despots, like Gamal Abdul Nasser in Egypt, the Ayatollahs in Iran and the Soviet and Chinese leaders during the Cold War, have leaned into leading movements that cross national borders on religious, ethnic or ideological grounds, which is much rarer today.
One final comment: if you ever have to debate despots, it is often the case that the entire economy and structure of their dictatorship is built on one or a few resources, like oil in the Middle East or Venezuela, cocoa in West Africa or minerals in Central Africa. If every soldier and bureaucrat the dictator pays is paid with oil or diamond money, you can simplify the debate down to who better controls and extracts that resource.
As I say, though, these debates are unlikely and they’re specifically unlikeliest at a high school level. Instead, what I mean by “democracy: good or bad?” is debates set in democracies about whether we should be even more democratic or not. A great example of this is motions along the lines of “THBT all democracies should allow laws to be passed through voter-initiated referenda”, easily the motion about democracy itself you’re likeliest to see at a high school level.
Thankfully, we finish out this article with a very simple concept. When people get to decide stuff, that's democracy at work, and that's a good thing: the more people who personally approved an outcome, the happier the population is and the more popular support there is to ensure that that outcome can be carried out (e.g 2/3rds of the population voting for legalising euthanasia heavily deters any group from bothering to try push back on making euthanasia accessible, as most voters will oppose you trying to do so).
However, in the words of Tommy Lee Jones, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” When people watch a vote on a single referendum issue, that referendum is easily swayed by forces better at marketing than governing, and can often become about something other than the referendum itself. Brexit, for instance, became an opportunity for the British public to give both middle fingers to the ruling class, even though it’s widely regarded in hindsight as a massive policy blunder.
The alternative to direct democracy, then, is our representative democracy: in almost every democracy besides Switzerland, almost all our policy decisions are done through the complexity of holding an election to settle who all the decisionmakers are, and then leaving them to sort out who’ll run the government and what that government will do for a few years, leaving the laws and courts to check them and public opinion as more of an indirect influence. Politicians generally know what they’re doing, but they’re also, well, politicians. Do you trust them farther than you can throw them?
This is the core divide behind motions about restructuring how our democracy itself operates, of which referendums are just one example. Generally, one side is arguing that the public can be informed enough to make good decisions and decisions are better implemented when the public has directly gotten to buy in, or when politicians only choose to do things that are popular with the public. (This is particularly the case with very sensitive subjects like abortion and euthanasia that are usually what go to referendums.) The other side instead argue the public will make net bad decisions and that decisions are more effectively implemented when politicians are able to negotiate their details.
The final thing to say on 3) is that sometimes, the argument becomes whether about politicians, judges or other forces should have more or less power to obstruct change. For instance, the filibuster in the USA is a technique commonly used by the party that lost the last election to stop the ruling party implementing their policies. These arguments generally come down to the same moderate/radical divides from 1): is it better for a country if the government can do a whole lot at once, or if they can’t and are forced to compromise to get much done at all?
In summation, then, when you get a motion that's about politics, judge it as follows. Is this a debate about how an entire country should make its decisions? If yes, it's probably a Type 3, and you need to figure out if the side you're on believes in people or politicians and mech from there why those are better decisionmakers than the other. Is it instead about political actors? Well, then you've got to break it down. Either you're thinking about who that political faction should be made up of, in which case it's a Type 2, or you're thinking about what positions that political faction should take, in which case it's a Type 1. Got a Type 2? You should heavily characterise for your case what kind of politician is best at getting public approval and making effective decisions in government. A Type 1? It’s the classic moderate/radical arguments: is it better to ensure you can do a little at a time, or gamble on getting a whole lot done at once?
These are not absolutely definitive rubrics and you should use your own brain cells, but they are a good overview of what to expect from politics motions. Next time, I’ll complement the background I’ve already given with the rest of the world’s Politics 101.
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