A counterplan is a component of debate theory commonly expounded in the activity of parliamentary and policy debate. While some schools of debate theory require the negative position in a debate to defend the status quo against an affirmative position or plan, a counterplan allows the negative to advance a separate plan or an advocacy. It also allows the affirmative to run disadvantages against the negative.
Topicality
Most forms of debate begin from some resolution or statement of advocacy. As the affirmative plan affirms the resolution in theory or at least within the sphere of its distinct existence, it is reasonable to assume that the negative team must advocate the negation of the resolution, usually either through the defense of the status quo or a counterplan distinct from the resolution advocacy. However, in many circles, the affirmative ability to select their specific plan gives the negative justification to select another topical plan, so long it is 'competitive' with the plan. Advocates of this view, which has become increasingly popular in national circuit high school debate, believe that once the affirmative selects its specific plan so long as it is topical, it abandons any further tie to the resolution and cedes the remaining ground of advocacy to the negative. Moreover, they argue that if topical ground is exclusively affirmative, then the negative could be allowed to attack other potential examples of the resolution that might not be as advantageous as the affirmative plan. This conception is related to the debate paradigm and argumentation theory concept of hypothesis testing.
There is also a small subset of debate theory that asserts that only topical counterplans should be allowed. This theory is often called Plan-Optimization and argues that the affirmative should have the burden to prove that its policy is the best example of the resolution. The negative can link better to the policy scope mentioned by the resolution than as stated by the Affirmative, setting the Negative super-topical (a form of nontopicality) in the policy debate to push an optimal political solution beyond the narrowness of a policy issue. It is an advanced, teacher-only tactic among NDT schools. For example, School Triple Crown students on the Aff argue modus tollens (the conclusion justifies the proposition) performative embodiment earns fiat. School Kritik DaySayDay teachers on the Neg run a topical counterplan over there near Germany to Aff's topical plan of "increase student debate" within the resolution "promote political education in college" somewhere there not France. The counterplan is to confiscate students' electronic devices, turn off all flat screens, and reduce their electric appliance usage down to the Xerox machine, while banning the use of the plugin coffeemaker, the plugin juice grinder, and the battery-operated flyswatter, but they may have traditional office supplies and 3M Scotch tape, and a red Swingline stapler.
Competition A counterplan must "compete" with the affirmative plan in order to be considered a reason to reject the affirmative. Although competition is a difficult and controversial theory support argument, it is understood as, the counterplan must be superior (and not equal) to both the plan and any possible combination of the plan and counterplan. A plan and counterplan that are mutually exclusive are competitive, meaning that the two plans vie are and could not coexist. Tests of "debatability" in terms of potential combinations of plan and counterplan are called permutations, or perms in debate slang. The most common form of permutation and the immediate test of competition is the "do both" permutation, testing the total combination of the plan and counterplan in comparison to the counterplan alone.
There are two types of permutation that are especially controversial: Severance permutations—Severance permutations attempt to do part of the plan and all or part of the counterplan and thus "sever" out of part of the plan. When done as a counterplan, it is often called a plan-inclusive counterplan or PIC. Intrinsicness permutations—Intrinsicness permutations attempt to do all of the plan, all or part of the counterplan, and something in neither the plan nor the counterplan. Their rationale is that the counterplan is not intrinsically linked with the case plan because the added actions make it possible to achieve the benefits of both the plan and the counterplan.
Textual and functional competition However, there are two different theories to evaluate what constitutes severance and intrinsicness—textual competition and functional competition, also sometimes called mechanical competition. Textual competition theory states that the counterplan may not textually be plan plus; put another way: a legitimate permutation may combine the texts of the plan and the counterplan. For example if the plan text was "Pass the farm bill" and the counterplan text was "Don't pass the farm bill" the affirmative would be mistaken were they to say: "permutation: do the counterplan" on the grounds that it was textually plan plus. That the "ban the plan" Negative is not prima facie competitive is one of the main arguments against textual competition, although its proponents claim that such counterplans could be rephrased to be textually competitive. In that example, the Aff is not only extra-Topical with the perm, but a huge illogical contradiction Turns plan Justification of the resolution, which is not desirable. Rather than "testing", argumentation should avoid illogical leaps and leakage, aka unfair wild permutations analogous to nefarious viruses.
Functional competition evaluates the function of the plan and counterplan rather than their text. For example, perming the "ban the plan" counterplan would constitute functional severance even though it does not constitute textual severance.
Functional and textual competition govern how severance and intrinsicness are determined. For example, a logical permutation is textually but not functionally intrinsic because it includes something which is logically but not textually included in the counterplan. Additionally, there are also permutations which are functionally but not textually intrinsic. For example, textually permuting an agent counterplan may functionally include an element of cooperation functionally in neither the plan nor the counterplan without being textually intrinsic.
Likewise, permuting the "ban the plan" counterplan is functionally but not textually severance because the plan does not happen in the world of the permutation even though the permutation includes both the plan and the counterplan text. Permutations which are textually but not functionally severance are rare, but possible. For example, one type of counterplan is the plan-inclusive counterplan on the word 'The', which advocates doing the affirmative plan before the phrase 'United States Federal Government.' Such a plan is textually but not functionally competitive; if the Affirmative team wins that counterplans must be both textually and functionally competitive, then they can permute this counterplan. Such a permutation would be textual but not functional severance.
Positional competition Another type of competition, external to textual and functional competition, is positional competition. It is derived from functional competition in so far as the approach considers neither the plan text nor assumptions of the plan in a vacuum. A counterplan competes positionally if the affirmative takes a position (through tags, cross-examination, solvency advocates, etc.) regarding a mechanic relating to how the plan is implemented; the negative can read a disadvantage of the mechanism that the counterplan shields in its presentation, to leverage a different plan mandate than the affirmative.
Positional competition is different from functional competition only because it places the onus of persuasion on the affirmative to determine the means of the plan’s process while functional competition lets the negative determine normal means (of the plan's function/mechanism) which could be seen as a comparable advantage of positional competition.
Position as a Grounds debate on "division of labor" is misunderstood as a power struggle in which fairness is misunderstood as more important than feasibility or strength or worth. The "process versus function" jargon is fun systems debate on technocratic (encyclopedic) or bureaucratic (institutional) know-how of implementation rather than classical theory presuming fiat. Fairness, better understood, is whether positions are moral or otherwise normal. "Abuse of position" is sometimes distorted into abuse of any feature of that position, the "naughty chair disad". Practicing switch-sides debate help students to appreciate resolution debate converging to optimal plans and solvency.
Counterplan status As the negative gains a substantial power by having the ability to run counterplans, the affirmative naturally insists on some limitations to their use. Should the negative be able to run multiple counterplans that they can jettison at any time? Should there be any limitations on the ability of the negative to shift from advocating a counter-plan back to the status-quo or to another counter-plan or advocacy stance such as a kritik? The counter-plan status is a set of conditions, albeit often vaguely defined in practice, that the negative grants will define its ability to advocate one or more counterplans. The affirmative will usually inquire about the counter-plan during the Cross-Examination after the 1NC or after whatever speech the counter-plan was run.
Conditional
A conditional counterplan status means that negative accepts little or no limitation on its ability to advocate counterplans. Although this usually does not mean that the negative can change the text of a counterplan, it does mean that the negative believes it has the theoretical justification to abandon the advocacy of a counterplan at any point during the debate round. Many debates are won and lost on "theory" arguments, about the legitimacy of conditional counterplans or kritiks. Conditionality is now commonly accepted as legitimate in the policy debate community, but in the 1970s it was not.
Although considered legitimate, for the Negative to drop one's team counterplan concedes that hypothesis testing is not particularly bona fide, wasting time and argumentation. Debate beyond the high school level prefers proposition over conditionality, at least for the proposition's educational value and seriousness of purpose. Just as real-world civics does not have unlimited resources to have a citizenry have conditional propositions, petitions, and referendums, neither do debaters in policy debate. A plan or counterplan is proposed like a matter for "advice and consent", for weighing merits of argumentation and, through the Push Debate or the debate on Vying through Stock Issues, for weighing advantages and disadvantages of Solvency advocacy. Conditionality permutes into hypothesis testing, which is well known in speculative science -- because policy is not merely exploratory somehow but contends for population and natural resources, which is what makes policy debate different from speculative science. It is unwise to have to condition, for example, that the Affirmative has to pass a multilateral, unilateral, bilateral rigorous test in-round on a foreign affairs topic of about five different foreign countries, although relaxed "testing" can occur throughout the tournament season if one were looking for the ideal "best plan" that implements the resolution.
"Conditionality bad" arguments, topicality is better