Democratic Partisanship: From Theoretical Ideal to Empirical Standard

Abstract

In recent years, a number of scholars have taken parties and partisanship as objects of normative theorizing. They posit partisanship as a fundamentally democratic practice and develop a model of what partisans can do at their best to contribute to liberal democracy.However, the standards the literature puts forth remain insufficiently specified to serve as If parties fulfil such irreplaceable functions, this also implies that their failures will have consequences for the vitality of modern democracy (Goodin 2008). While a vast literature documents the democratic performance of political parties, party scholars have been reluctant to engage with contemporary democratic theory. This has resulted in a body of work that is generally under-theorized, and which tends to overlook some of the central affective and symbolic functions that parties perform (van Biezen and Saward 2008). This paper responds to these challenges with a model of democratic partisanship amenable to empirical study. My starting point is a recent body of democratic theory that takes partisanship as its main object, and from which I derive a number of standards for democratic partisanship. For the purpose of this article, I define partisanship as the routinized practices and discourses of the supporters, members and leaders of a particular party in support of a shared conception of the public good. 2 Partisanship is democratic when these routinized practices and discourses contribute to liberal democracy, understood as a system of limited representative government that ensures both popular self-rule 2 As emphasized by White and Ypi, partisanship conceived as the "collective will of partisans" can exist without a party structure at its centre (White and Ypi 2016, 23). For the purpose of this article, I focus on those more easily identifiable communities that find an organizational expression and are thus tied together by party support, membership or leadership.Lise Herman, Forthcoming, American Political Science Review 3 and respect for minority rights. The set of specific indicators that this article develops serves to empirically evaluate the democratic merits of partisan discourse more specifically.In what follows, I will first discuss the lack of engagement of party studies with democratic theory, and how existing theories of partisanship are either insufficiently refined or insufficiently comprehensive to empirically evaluate the democratic merits of partisan discourses and practices on their basis. In the second part of this paper, I further conceptualize these theories and focus on two main characteristics that the literature ascribes to democratic forms of partisanship:cohesiveness and respect for political pluralism. Starting from these two general concepts, I derive a series of more specific indicators that can serve to evaluate the extent to which the discourses of real-world partisans meet these normative ideals. The last section of the paper illustrates how this theoretical framework can be applied in empirical studies of...

Extraordinary partisanship in the European Union: Constituent power and the problem of political agency

“…A key aspect that distinguishes (democratic) parties from actors such as interest groups is that they pursue programs that are meant to serve the entire political community and that they understand this collective—and not merely a subgroup of it—as the relevant addressee when it comes to the public justification of their objectives. For partisans, “loyalty to the demos as a whole has precedence over … allegiance to particular groups of voters” (Herman, 2017, p. 744). DiEM25 appears to conform to this normative understanding of partisanship.…”

Can partisans be pluralist? A comparative study of party member discourse in France and Hungary

“…The remaining of this paper addresses these questions with an exploratory study of the attitudes of 117 party members in France and Hungary towards their political opponents, based on a framework derived from theories of democratic partisanship. How partisans relate to their political opposition can indeed be seen a key domain of expression of pluralist partisanship (for an overview, see Herman, 2017; Herman and Muirhead, 2020). The very engagement of partisans is rooted in the conviction that their own ideas and policies are superior to those of their opponents (Rosenblum, 2008: 358).…”

“…In the past decade, a number of democratic theorists have aimed to rehabilitate partisanship as a normative category, and thus account for what ‘good partisanship’ entails in democratic societies (Bonotti, 2012, 2014, 2019; Bonotti et al, 2018; Herman, 2017; Herman and Muirhead, 2020; Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein, 2017; Muirhead, 2006, 2014; Muirhead and Rosenblum, 2006; Rosenblum, 2008; Stojanović and Bonotti, 2019; White, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; White and Ypi, 2010, 2011, 2018; Wolkenstein, 2016a, 2016b, 2018, 2019). Against the long-standing belief that partisanship, defined here as an array of discourses and practices in support of a certain vision of the common good attached to partisan identification (Herman, 2017), is necessarily vector of intolerance and division, one of the central contentions of this literature is that partisanship is compatible with a pluralist orientation. At their best, pluralist partisans exert restraint with regard to their own convictions and recognise that there exist other legitimate interpretations of what constitutes the common good than their own.…”

“…For this purpose, I conduct a micro-level comparative study of party members discourse in two different national contexts, France and Hungary. Adapting the criteria I previously established to study pluralist commitments in political discourse (Herman, 2017), this study relies on focus-group methodology to analyse the ways in which a total of 117 party members understand political disagreement and relate to their political opposition in the main centre-left and centre-right partisan organisations in France and Hungary.…”

The Democratic Production of Political Cohesion: Partisanship, Institutional Design and Life Form

“…Experiments in intra-party deliberation hold the potential to develop the model further (Invernizzi Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017). There is also research that suggests normative conceptions of partisanship can be usefully deployed to the analysis of contemporary parties in some unlikely settings (Herman 2016(Herman , 2017).…”