Title: Winning on the Merits: The Joint Effects of Content and Style on Debate Outcomes,
Abstract: Debate and deliberation play essential roles in politics and government, but
most models presume that debates are won mainly via superior style or agenda
control. Ideally, however, debates would be won on the merits, as a function of
which side has the stronger arguments. We propose a predictive model of debate
that estimates the effects of linguistic features and the latent persuasive
strengths of different topics, as well as the interactions between the two.
Using a dataset of 118 Oxford-style debates, our model's combination of content
(as latent topics) and style (as linguistic features) allows us to predict
audience-adjudicated winners with 74% accuracy, significantly outperforming
linguistic features alone (66%). Our model finds that winning sides employ
stronger arguments, and allows us to identify the linguistic features
associated with strong or weak arguments.