Policy Debate:

1
Policy Debate

• a form of speech competition in which teams of
  two debate whether or not a specific policy
  action should be enacted

2
Burdens of the affirmative

• Stock issues
• Main article 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.

3
They are

• Solvency The plan should succeed in solving for
  a harm in the status quo or creating an advantage
  over the status quo.
• Harms The affirmative should demonstrate a harm
  in the status quo. This stock issue is often
  labeled 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
  absent the plan. 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.

4

• 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. The negative team is not allowed to argue
  that existing political elements will block the
  plan or not fund it, they must instead prove why
  the plan is a bad idea that should not pass.
  Inherency is often not labeled 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 chance, however
  small, that the status quo will not solve the
  case.

5

• Topicality The affirmative case must affirm the
  resolution.
• Significance The affirmative must be
  significant. 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," with the
  mnemonic S.H.I.T.S. or the classroom-appropriate
  variant S.I.T.H.S.

6
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 ameliorate 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.

7
Negation theory

• a theory of how a debate round should be decided
  which dictates that the negative need only negate
  the affirmative instead of having to negate the
  resolution. The acceptance of negation theory
  allows negative teams to run arguments such as
  Topical Counterplans, that may affirm the
  resolution, but they still negate the affirmative
  plan.

8
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. In some cases, such as when
  a negative team wishes to win in a Disadvantages
  debate but has no good solvency turn (i.e.
  nothing that proves that the Affirmative plan
  actually causes or aggravates the harms the
  Affirmative team cites), the Negative will attack
  Significance or Advantages, especially when the
  Affirmative team cites a critical Advantage or
  colossally bad Harm. Most debates that are
  "on-case" (that is, directly responsive to the
  Affirmative plan), however, are Solvency debates.
  

9

• The Negative will attempt to argue that the
  Affirmative team does not fall under the rubric
  of the resolution and should be rejected
  immediately regardless of the merits or
  advantages of the plan. This is a type of
  'meta-debate' argument, as both sides then spend
  time defining various words or phrases in the
  resolution, laying down standards for why their
  definition(s) or interpretation(s) is superior
  (including arguments such as referring to the
  amount of argumentative "ground" either team
  would have under their or the opposing team's
  definition or interpretation of the resolution),
  and even spend time discussing what Topicality is
  and whether or not it is a relevant burden!

10

• Topicality is also often considered a leveling
  factor in high school debate A Negative team
  that is less well-funded, prepared or skillful or
  facing a case that they are not prepared for can
  use Topicality to win, or at least force the
  Affirmative to spend substantial amounts of time
  rebutting (in this case, Topicality is known as a
  "time-suck"). For this reason, many arguments
  have come into vogue arguing that topicality is
  theoretically or critically repugnant Perhaps
  Topicality as a timesuck is unfair and should be
  punished, or perhaps language is so vague that
  the Negative team is simply imperially attacking
  an unconventional and creative Affirmative, or
  perhaps the Affirmative is discussing something
  so important that Topicality should be ignored.
  Most judges seem to reject these arguments,
  though they must still be rebutted.

11

• 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.

12

• Politics This is a subset of the Disadvantage,
  but worth noting independently, because of many
  complex and controversial theory/critical
  arguments that reference Politics and its
  admissibility. The general format has to do with
  other policies in the real world that the plan
  would ostensibly effect. For example An
  Affirmative plan may be such a sharp change or
  shift from a generally conservative Senate that
  the Senate feels that it must rally its hardline
  conservative base with a policy that the Negative
  argues has titanically bad results (typically
  nuclear war, ecocidal extinction or similar
  levels of disadvantage).

13

• Politics Disadvantages are unique in a few ways
  They typically require up-to-the-moment
  Uniqueness (as political climates are constantly
  changing), which generally favors larger or
  better funded squads as they are more likely to
  have the resources and time to acquire the newest
  Uniqueness. Unlike many other Disadvantages, they
  change substantially from year to year and even
  month to month, as new bills are considered and
  others defeated. Further, while most
  Disadvantages are accepted (at least
  theoretically if not critically), Politics face
  common theoretical and critical objections. Many
  argue that Politics Disadvantages are fiat
  confusions They deal with HOW the plan passes,
  not whether it SHOULD pass. Other arguments
  allege that the focus or style of Politics
  Disadvantages lull debaters into an elitist
  mindset, or distort reality beyond recognition,
  and should be rejected on those debits.

14

• Critique The negative can claim that the
  affirmative is guilty of a certain mindset or
  assumption that should be grounds for rejection.
  Critics are sometimes a reason to reject the
  entire affirmative advocacy without evaluating
  its policy other times, critiques can be
  evaluated within the same framework for
  evaluation as the affirmative case. Examples of
  some critiques 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.

15

• 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.

16
To summarize

• Affirmative must present proposition and come up
  with plan to change status quo. Thus, they have
  the burden of proof (show how advantages of plan
  outweigh disadvantages).
• Negative has three basic ways to negate
• 1. Status quo is fine as is
• 2. Status Quo sucks but so does your
  planwell stick w/ the SQ
• 3. Status Quo sucks, so does your plan, and we
  have a better plan