Part Two: If you want the judge to know what you mean, you have to tell them what you mean
(Part One to this series, which introduces what we’re trying to accomplish and covers the flip side of this article, can be found here. The rest are on the way. This is the least politics-specific article of the series; I’m using the subject here as a Trojan horse for good fundamentals.)
Almost every debating speaker speaks for most to all of their speaking time. (If you don’t, that’s okay. Try using some of your remaining time to take a breath, read back through your paper, and see if you can add just one more mech to your case, or step through a humanising example. Judges don’t dock points for pauses, we add them for new content!) Whether a speaker chooses to say every single thing they’ve thought of - or to develop every idea they’ve suggested - is another matter.
Lacking the confidence to get specific about what you mean is a widespread problem. (This isn’t limited to debating - watch action/drama/thriller movies or shows without top-notch writers’ rooms and pay attention to what characters say, and you’ll soon realise they tend to speak in vague emoting a lot of the time. Or don’t, because noticing this whenever it crops up gets annoying as hell.) Everybody notices the small minority who are too loud about things they ought to pipe down on, as discussed in Part One. It’s very rare, on the other hand, to notice missed opportunities and speakers choosing not to say things…from a speaker perspective. To judges, it’s abundantly clear.
Speakers don't want to lock themselves into specific examples. These specific examples can look like, for instance, claiming which parties are the biggest in a country, or what issues are the highest priorities for the most voters. They fear the moment that we all experience sooner or later: an opposing speaker stands, shows they definitely understand the example far better than you do, demolishes your example and the argument based on that example, and kills your chances.
For me, it was in Year 12. At first aff, I set out our case that dairy farms could easily be converted into producing crops like grain and maintain similar profit margins with much better environmental outcomes. First neg then shared that she grew up on a West Coast dairy farm and embarrassed us for running such a nonsensical case. That placed us in the classic fork of a doomed case: try to pivot on the fly, which requires a very high level of casebuilding in quantity and quality and even more confidence to pull it off, or keep running the case. We did the latter and, like most teams in that situation, we lost. For her…it was Wednesday.
This should never have happened. I grew up helping to set out feeders for calves in the predawn darkness. I should have had the confidence to say in prep that, at the point at which Fonterra is regulated to scrap their rotolactors, stop breeding their dairy cows and start planting maize and corn, we would be hebben ein serious problem. But I was the youngest speaker on the team, and I have always been the least confident personality on whichever team I sit on. I went along with the plan. We needed to work on our case more, but we didn't, and they were good enough to punish our error. We defaulted to easy, lazy assumptions on what the alternative looked like rather than specifically identifying how farmers and corporations would receive the news, what changes they would decide on, and how this would work given the context they operate within.
All of this is amplified in debates involving specific political views. There are all kinds of pressures against doing this. We are young people unsure of what's what. Talking politics is typically taboo, lying somewhere between annoying and weird. You may disagree with your teammates. You might feel judging eyes on you from the audience or speakers, particularly if you were to touch on anything personal to you. (As I discussed in the first article, don’t force yourself to engage if you really feel you’d just have a sucky time getting into a topic sensitive for you.)
The rest of the time, you need to be specific if you hope to win the debate. Let me give you an example. I just judged Canterbury Regionals, and in Round Three, the motion set was THBT progressive political campaigns should refuse to accept donations from corporations and high-earning individuals. (In plain English, “should left-wing parties take money to campaign with from companies and rich people?”) This is a plain as day politics motion: an argument about the best way for a specific subset of political actors to do politics.
The affirming team correctly identified the most straightforward case to run: when leftie parties take the $$$ of the rich, they risk setting policy on a national level that helps the rich and business. Left-wing parties exist to advance the interests of poor people and minorities; serving the upper class and corporations typically runs counter to that goal. Their case included the attendant downstream consequences - one, bad policy isn't transparently disclosed to be evaluated as bad, and two, left-wing parties lose votes and can no longer win power to do good with. All well and good.
The neg's case was less ambitious, talking only about using the money to run ads and pay more staff so candidates could be personally known better, and delivering outcomes like playgrounds and hospitals in local communities. They also faced a problem: they seemed not to understand what political donations were for. Political donations, in countries like New Zealand, are to run campaigns with, and a party can only expect to earn a few million at most per election: meaningful to a campaign and a pittance in other fields. Yet the model seemed to suggest donations would be directly used to construct hospitals - illegal and impossible. Neg's case did less, was less plausible and brought fewer mechanisms...yet they won. How?
Aff lost for two reasons. One, they didn't challenge and rebut neg enough. Sometimes, judges will reject ludicrously absurd claims on their own - if aff’s case had been premised on the idea that Labour would get 100% of their donations from the Mongrel Mob and abolish prisons to pay them back, I’d be inclined to wait and hear some solid mechanisation for that. (Realistically, in the world of a debate, different realities will be offered by each team, which will implicitly push back on unrealistic characterisations - say, if neg instead told me the rich and business are generally efficient actors seeking the fastest path to mutually beneficial outcomes.)
However, you should never assume the judge will do your job for you. Always offer rebuttal to avoid cheeky claims from your opponents getting through unscathed. Neg had not been the most specific, but what they had specified, like the building of playgrounds and hospitals, they got away with because nobody on aff explained to me why political donations couldn't achieve this end. They had taken the risk of specific examples, and these paid off.
Two, aff had never been specific about what would happen. They kept saying greenwashing and mentioning how companies might do things around the environment, or tobacco companies might donate to political parties...but they never explained to me what the policy changes actually were. If they had told me that, say, Fonterra would get to dump more nitrates into rivers or excise tax would be cut on tobacco, they would clearly win the debate. They had more content, a bigger impact and a better understanding of the moot - but they did not carry out that final step, and a small, clear impact outweighed a big, unclear impact.
You might think that's a bit of a farcical judgement. I gave the debate to a team who didn't seem to fully understand the motion. My trainee gave the debate to aff and could cogently explain why. I've omitted details to condense the narrative for your sake, reader - I give these examples to bring my points to life, not to put any team under the gun - and I rightly told the teams that the debate was very close.
The simple reason why the result fell the way that it did was that I was the judge, not a speaker. I could not insert myself into the debate and help aff by mentally explaining to myself what might happen if a company donates to a progressive party to give themselves a green image. I could only judge the speakers on what they told me, and what they told me was not enough.
If you are not specific enough in your impacting, you make the debate riskier. Entirely aside from the strength of your case, you are leaving the outcome more in doubt, and making it less clear what your team's later speeches need to respond to. And, for that matter, often one speaker understands the case better than the others. If you practically illustrate your case, your own teammates listening to your speech can have that eureka moment where what the case is clicks and use their remaining time better.
You can't be as sure what the judge will focus on in deciding the debate. A team with a smaller policy impact than you can win the debate because their impact is simpler and more specific, and so it's proven they get theirs when it's not proven that you get yours, the same way that the 2*2>5*0.
Yes, whenever you decide to pick an example out of the air, you risk the chance that you will mess up the example. Yet unless your take is blatantly unreasonable, the other team will usually have to effectively rebut you to shut down a dodgy example. Even if you do fall flat on your face, you learn something that day; you’ll be ready the next time to ace the subject, and you’ll come away knowing one more thing about the world than you did before.
The alternative of not overcoming your indecision and settling on an example is still opening you up to risk, just like our grain and maize generalities proved to be too dangerous even though they seemed the safe path to me. It's riskier to be in a world where the judge thinks your case hasn’t won yet than one where the other team thinks your case hasn’t won yet. The latter is normal and common; the former is a flashing red danger signal.
In practical terms, then, you need to be challenging your team in prep. Ask what a point actually looks like in practice. Write out helpful examples, particularly if any of you can draw on your personal experience, like how your family's been affected by a policy (e.g immigrating and getting citizenship) or implementing one (e.g if a family member works as a nurse or teacher). The process of doing this will help to fill out time, structure your speeches, and frame how the judge processes the debate. Particularly for 1st speakers, this process identifies what characterisation work you need to do (eg what traits do these actors have? what is unique about the current situation?), while for 3rds and leaders, you can harp on how your case has been specific and point out what the other team has been too vague about to win.
Specifically for politics debates, I’ll be able to arm you with a lot more useful context to deploy in the coming articles. However, right now, the basic fundamentals I can say most teams are not specific about in politics debates are: why do politicians do politics; what does a politician (particularly a minister) do; why do voters vote, and vote the ways they do; and why do parties win and lose elections? These are the core questions to ask yourself, and to refine your answers to, as we continue through this series.
Make sure that somewhere in your speech, whichever speaker you are but particularly at 3rd and leader's, you explicitly tell the judge "Here is the thing that will happen. Here is the impact on people. This is why you should care." Do this and you will give the judge far more confidence that you won the debate. And, as it turns out, making the judge think you won the debate is the number one way to win more debates.
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