national parliamentary debate association

The National Parliamentary Debate Association (NPDA) is one of two United States national organizations which organizes intercollegiate parliamentary debate competition. The other is the American Parliamentary Debating Association (APDA). The NPDA is a relatively young organization, but has already become one of the largest debate organizations in the United States. There are usually several invitational tournaments throughout the country to choose from on almost every weekend of the academic year, the largest of which is held in February at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. Increasingly prominent within the world of NPDA is the online forum Net-Benefits.net which serves as an electronic hub for discourse and information on parliamentary debate.

NPDA, Parli, and Other Ambiguous Terms

To put things as simply as possible: parli, short for parliamentary debate is a debate format without quoted evidence. This places it in contrast to policy debate, which does have 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. For a very long time, there were only two organizations in the U.S. devoted to parliamentary debate, and NPDA was the far larger one. 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 debates is best understood in terms of circuits. The practical consequence of this is that the term "NPDA" began to be synonymous with "parliamentary debate," and even though that isn't quite accurate, that's still a common usage.

The NPDA Championship Tournament

The NPDA, in a technical sense, is just an organization that runs one debate tournament a year: the NPDA Championship Tournament, held in late March or early April at a different site each year. The reason anyone cares that the NPDA exists is that its tournament is huge. 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. Thus, this tournament's practices are generally modeled by smaller private invitational tournaments, which provide the bulk of year-long competition.

The Rules of NPDA Debate

Any mature debate circuit will develop, over time, 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 time limits. The standard time limits for an NPDA debate are:

Prime Minister's Constructive: 7 minutes
Leader of Opposition's Constructive: 8 minutes
Member of Government's Constructive: 8 minutes
Member of Opposition's Constructive: 8 minutes
Leader of Opposition's Rebuttal: 4 minutes
Prime Minister's 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 is one example of a college whose tournament has experimented with different time limits in the past. The other rule of importance is the ban on quoted evidence. Literally, this simply means that the debaters may not bring in printed evidence and consult it during the round. It is expected that debates will still use evidence of other forms and that arguments will still be backed by reasoning and empirics.