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Three decades of debate motions, in data
3rd Best APDA Debater · TOC Semifinalist · Columbia Debate Society Coach
Our motion bank holds 12,416 real tournament motions from 1994 to 2026, compiled from public records. Treated as a dataset, it shows the sport changing under debaters' feet: “This House would” motions have fallen from half of all recorded motions to a sixth, judgment motions (regrets, prefers, opposes, supports) have grown from a rounding error to more than a quarter, info slides went from novelty to nearly half of new motions, and the topics quietly rotated. None of this is visible from inside a single season, which is what makes a long dataset useful. Sample sizes by era: 269 recorded motions from 1994–2009, then 3,171 (2010–14), 2,629 (2015–19), and 6,347 (2020–26).
What happened to “This House would”?
The classic policy opening has been in steady decline for twenty years. Half of recorded motions before 2010 started with THW; in the 2020s, one in six does.
What replaced it is the judgment family: “This House regrets” (0.4 percent of motions before 2015, 10.1 percent in the 2020s), “This House prefers” (essentially nonexistent before 2015, now 7.4 percent), “supports” (7.4 percent) and “opposes” (3.9 percent). Together the four went from under 2 percent of recorded motions to 28.8 percent.
The remainder splits between “This House believes that” (still the single biggest opening at 26.4 percent, though down from 39) and motions not phrased with “This House” at all, a steady quarter of records since 2010, mostly from leagues and formats that write resolutions in plain language.
Policy motions have halved
Classifying by what the motion asks you to prove rather than its opening words tells the same story more sharply. Policy motions (defend an action and a model) fell from roughly half of recorded motions to 18.8 percent; value motions (prove a claim or a judgment) held around half throughout and now lead at 50.1 percent. Regret motions grew tenfold, from 1.1 to 10.7 percent, and actor motions (what should X do, argued from X's interests) went from essentially unrecorded to 9.4 percent.
For a debater, the practical difference is where rounds are won. A policy round turns on a model and its consequences; a judgment round turns on framing and weighing, because both sides usually concede the facts and fight about what they mean. A training diet built on THW motions, which is what most older prep material teaches, underprepares students for a third of the modern card. The motion types reference breaks down what each type demands.
The info-slide era
The sharpest change in the data is the rise of the info slide, the short background text released with the motion. Under 1 percent of recorded motions before 2010 carried one. In the 2020s, 45 percent do.
Info slides let setters run debates on specific, technical, or invented scenarios without punishing students who lack niche knowledge, and their spread is probably one cause of the trends above: a slide can carry the background a judgment motion needs. They also changed prep. The slide often narrows the debate more than the motion does, so reading it closely is now minute one of the prep hour. Motions have grown to match: the median recorded motion is 14 words long in the 2020s, up from 10 in the 1990s and 2000s. You can drill specifically on slide-bearing motions in the motion explorer.
Which topics rose, and which fell
Topic shares move more slowly than phrasing, but three shifts stand out. War and security motions fell by more than half, from 13.4 percent of topic tags before 2010 to 5.6 percent in the 2020s. Feminism and gender motions roughly doubled after 2010 (5.5 to about 9 percent, where they have stayed). Education motions tripled, from 2.1 to 6.5 percent. Economics is the quiet constant, always near the top and leading the 2020s at 11.6 percent, just ahead of international relations at 10.5. The absence that surprised us: environment motions have never exceeded about 2 percent of recorded motions in any era, climate salience notwithstanding, which makes them the kind of underprepped area the research system tells you to read against.
How the numbers were computed
Every figure is a share of the recorded motions in an era in our motion bank: 12,416 motions from 1,269 tournaments, compiled from the MIT hello-motions dataset, direct harvests of public Tabbycat tournament sites, and the official WSDC archive. Two honest caveats. Coverage is far thinner before 2010 (269 motions), so early-era figures are indicative rather than precise. And the record skews toward tournaments that publish tabs online, which over-represents the university-influenced circuits that adopt conventions like info slides earliest; the true averages across every school tournament on Earth are probably a step behind the trend lines here, moving the same direction. Motion text is verbatim from the sources throughout; classification into openings, types, and topics is ours.
Common questions
What do THW, THBT, THR, THS, THO, and THP mean in debate?
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They abbreviate the standard motion openings: THW is "This House would" (the House commits to an action), THBT is "This House believes that" (a claim to be proven), THR is "This House regrets" (a judgment that something that happened, or a trend, was bad), THS is "This House supports", THO is "This House opposes", and THP is "This House prefers" (a comparison between two worlds). "The House" is the debating chamber itself, a convention inherited from parliamentary procedure.
What is an info slide in debate?
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A short text released alongside the motion that defines a term, supplies necessary background, or sets the scenario, so that both teams debate the same thing. Info slides were rare before the 2010s and now accompany nearly half of newly recorded motions, which changes prep: reading the slide carefully is now the first task of the prep hour, because the slide often narrows the debate more than the motion does.
What is the most common type of debate motion?
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In recorded motions from the 2020s, value motions (prove a claim or judgment) are the most common at roughly half, followed by policy motions (defend an action) at just under a fifth, with regret and actor motions each around a tenth. Twenty years earlier the split was policy and value in roughly equal halves, with regret and actor motions barely existing.
Where do these numbers come from?
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From the 12,416 real tournament motions in our motion bank, compiled from public records: the MIT hello-motions dataset, direct harvests of public Tabbycat tournament sites, and the official WSDC motion archive. Every statistic is a share of recorded motions in an era, and the article states each era’s sample size; coverage is thinner before 2010, and skews toward tournaments that publish their tabs.
We train for the motions being set now.
Our practice rounds are drawn from the same bank this data comes from, weighted toward the judgment motions and info slides that decide modern tournaments.