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Introduction to Policy Debate

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As you advance through your debate career, you will have a better understanding of all of the different disadvantages that people are likely to run and how to answer them.  As you grow to gain this knowledge, it will be possible for you to prepare more specific answers to each disadvantage. Until then, you can help yourself by thinking about different general approaches and arguments that you can use to defeat all kinds of disadvantages.

Use your affirmative to non-unique the disadvantage.  As discussed in the last section, most disadvantages have impacts related to war.  Affirmative plans often contain advantages that stem from preventing war. You can use your affirmative case to argue that war is inevitable unless you vote affirmative and that the disadvantage is non-unique.  Think about any harm claim that you have made in your 1AC. If a disadvantage impact is similar to any harm claim you have made, you can argue that that disadvantage is non-unique in the status quo and can be prevented by voting affirmative.

Use your affirmative to solve the impact.  Think of a way that voting for the affirmative can prevent the impact. For example, if your affirmative case focuses on increasing democracy, have a general piece of evidence that says democracy prevents war. If your affirmative case increases military readiness, be sure to have a piece of evidence that says readiness protects the economy and another that says readiness prevents war.

Maintain an apriori claim.  An apriori claim is a claim that one teams makes that they will say is more important than all of claims made by the other side. For example, an affirmative team may argue that the judge has a moral obligation to support their plan.  They will argue that this moral obligation should hold even if the negative disadvantages are true.  If you have an apriori claim for your affirmative, you can always be prepared to argue that this trumps the negative’s disadvantage.

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