National Parliamentary Debate Association

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The National Parliamentary Debate Association (NPDA) is one of the two national intercollegiate parliamentary debate organizations in the United States. The other is the American Parliamentary Debating Association (APDA). The NPDA is a relatively young organization, but it is now the largest college debate organization in the United States. Its membership is national, with participating schools on both coasts and throughout the country.

1 The Rules of NPDA Debate
2 The NPDA Championship Tournament
3 Relationship to Other Tournaments and Organizations
4 Communicating Between Tournaments
5 NPDA National Champions
6 External links

[edit] The Rules of NPDA Debate

In tournaments sponsored or sanctioned by the NPDA, teams of two persons debate head-to-head. Tournaments issue a new topic each round, generally on issues such as politics, philosophy, and current affairs, and speeches begin after limited preparation time.

Any mature debate circuit will develop its own customs and practices. However, the NPDA rules are very laissez-faire, preferring to let the norms of what constitutes valid argumentation be subjects for the debate itself. The rules primarily seek to implement a few features of the debate that have to be specified for procedural reasons.

The first of these is the short period of time for preparing for a debate. Parliamentary debate, which is often shortened as "parli," is a debate format in which tournament officials assign a new topic every round. After the announcement of the topic, the two teams have a limited preparation time (usually 15 minutes) during which to write out their respective cases.

The second important rule is time limits. The standard time limits for an NPDA debate are:

First Proposition Speaker: 7 minutes
First Opposition Speaker: 8 minutes
Second Proposition Speaker: 8 minutes
Second Opposition Speaker: 8 minutes
Opposition Rebuttal: 4 minutes
Proposition Rebuttal: 5 minutes

There are tournaments, however, at which these are modified, generally to a 7-7-7-7-5-5 format. The Claremont Colleges tournament, for instance, uses this 7-5 format. During constructive speeches, debaters may introduce new arguments and the speaker's opponents may rise to ask questions of the speaker. Constructive speakers can accept or reject any given question. Rebuttals are exclusively for summarizing the arguments that were made during constructives.

The third rule of importance is the ban on quoted evidence. Literally, this simply means that the debaters may not bring in printed, published evidence and consult it during the round. It is expected that debaters will use their own preexisting knowledge and research conducted prior to the start of the actual round to back their arguments with reasoning and empirical data.

Once they enter the debating chambers, parliamentary debaters are prohibited from using published materials to supplement their arguments. This places parli in stark contrast to the other common intercollegiate debate format: policy debate. Policy debaters rely heavily on quoted evidence. Though thousands of words have been written about the differences between the two in practice, that is the only meaningful structural difference between them.

[edit] The NPDA Championship Tournament

The NPDA runs one debate tournament each year: the NPDA Championship Tournament, held in late March or early April at rotating host sites. While the inaugural tournament in 1994 only hosted around 40 teams, the 2004 Championship Tournament was the largest debate tournament in world history with over 300 teams in the field from over a half-dozen nations. The tournament also features an exhibition debate between a team of Irish debaters and a team of debaters selected by the NPDA; ironically, the US audience consistently votes for the Irish team.

This tournament's practices are generally modeled by smaller invitational tournaments, which provide the bulk of year-long competition. NPDA sanctions many of these tournaments, and the school that does the best at sanctioned invitationals over the course of the year is awarded a year-long sweepstakes championship.

[edit] Relationship to Other Tournaments and Organizations

There are usually several NPDA-sanctioned invitational tournaments throughout the country to choose from on almost every weekend of the academic year. Among the largest and oldest of these in the country is the Sunset Cliffs Classic held in February at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California.

Until 2001, there were only two national organizations in the U.S. devoted to parliamentary debate. With the emergence of the National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence (NPTE), the situation has gotten somewhat more complicated. Some have suggested that the world of collegiate debate is best understood in terms of circuits; these different circuits breed different styles of debating and judging. While NPDA and NPTE teams are not reasonably construed as constituting separate circuits, NPTE has catered to the part of the NPDA circuit that is composed of more specialized debaters and judges.

Some prefer the invitation-only NPTE championship tournament; such people often cite the greater predictability due to a common ethos among elite teams and coaches. Other debaters and coaches prefer the NPDA championship due to its longer history, higher numbers of participants, and greater accessibility. Further, many criticize the administration of the NPTE as undemocratic. Since almost all NPTE participants also attend NPDA nationals, and since almost all NPTE-sanctioned invitational tournaments are also NPDA-sanctioned, the NPTE circuit is best conceived of as a subset of the broader NPDA circuit. This, however, is changing. The larger pool of competition at NPDA nationals means that more judges are needed. With around 208 teams entering the tournament in 2006, standards for judges are significantly lower at the NPDA national tournament. Debate techniques and styles that are largely considered a cross-over from policy debate, and represent the most successful styles at NPDA tournaments have made judging for the layperson much more difficult. The result is that nationally successful teams can run into judges who do not understand, and/or appreciate policy-esque debate and lose important rounds at NPDA nationals. This is particularly true of the quadruple- and triple-octa-final rounds. In these rounds, three judges are required for each panel. The demand for judges far exceeds the supply of those who will tolerate some types of argumentation. The result is a slowly growing movement of teams away from NPDA nationals, and into NPTE. This is most true with teams with limited budgets, where only a handful of tournaments are affordable. While NPDA continues to grow with the addition of new schools and more debaters, the question remains as to whether the shift from NPDA to NPTE will start to outpace NPDA's growth. Nevertheless, even at the NPDA championship, teams practicing a more NPTE-style of debate have been quite successful in recent years.

[edit] Communicating Between Tournaments

Almost from its inception, the NPDA community has taken advantage of the Internet to continue debates (and to debate about debates) between tournaments and in the off-season. For years, this took place via the official electronic mailing list, much to the chagrin of those who saw that resource as best used for official communication such as posting tournament invitations and results.

Today, much of the online debate (especially between competitors) in the NPDA community takes place via the online forum Net-Benefits.net, founded by University of Southern California then-undergraduate Jed Link. The name "Net-Benefits" is a pun, referring to the debate paradigm by which the debate judge weighs the net benefits of two competing policies. The site is now an electronic hub for discourse and information on parliamentary debate.