Winning a Debate at The Soho Forum
The Soho Forum is an Oxford-style debate series that takes place in NYC. So far there have been 39 debates(and one “discussion”).
Oxford-style means that the audience is polled on the resolution before and after the debate and the winner is decided by comparing the two polls. At The Soho Forum, the person increasing their vote percentage point more is considered the winner. Though there are alternative ways to score an Oxford-style debate, which I will be looking at at a later date.
Now, however, let’s look, on a very macro-level, at how to win one.
Of the 38 debates, 15 were won by the person in favor of the resolution, 22 by against, and 2 were drawn.
| Winner | Debates | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Affirmative | 15 | 38% |
| Negative | 22 | 56% |
| draw | 2 | 5% |
A curious mind might enquire if that hints at some sort of an advantage to the person disagreeing with the resolution.
I’ve sorted the debates into two - debates where a libertarian position is going against a non-libertarian position and everything else. An example of the first would be “All government support of higher education should be abolished." and of the second “There is little or no rigorous evidence that vegetarian/vegan diets are healthier than diets that include meat, eggs, and dairy."
Looking to see if there is a libertarian bias, we can see that the libertarian positions have won 16 out of 21. And there were 2 draws, and 16 topics weren’t libertarian on one side.
Particularly, a noticeable difference occurs when the libertarian position was to disagree with the resolution.
| Resulution phrasing | Affirmative win | Negative win | Draw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Libertarian | 7 | 5 | 1 |
| Non-libertarian | 0 | 9 | 1 |
| Other debates | 8 | 8 | 0 |
Out of 10 debates where that was the case(e.g. “Socialism is more effective than capitalism in bringing freedom to the masses."), the negative won 9 and drew 1.
So, perhaps there is an advantage to hold the libertarian position in the debate as well as disagreeing with the resolution. The negative position does get the final word in the debate. A smart debater might want to hold the libertarian position and push for the resolution to be phrased in a way he can oppose.
That is all for now. Stay tuned for the next time when I’ll be looking at other scoring methods. Maybe we can find a winner in two of the drawn debates or see if the winner could be switched in any of the other debates.