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

Abstract

What binds a democratic society together? This would seem a well-rehearsed topic in modern political theory, but on closer scrutiny, it may appear less so. If we reformulate the question, it may become clearer why: What binds democratic society together? The emphasis on 'democratic' is the clue here. Much recent discussion on the cohesive force in democracies has been parasitic on other debates, such as that between cosmopolitans and communitarians on justice as the first virtue of society; that between nation state-based and post-national

What Is It Like To Be a Partisan? Measures of Partisanship and Its Value for Democracy

“…Political theorists have recently come to a new appreciation for the importance of political parties and partisanship in democracy. Works exploring the democratic functions of parties (Disch 2002;Rosenblum 2008;Goodin 2008, 204-23;Muirhead 2014;Rosenbluth and Shapiro 2018;Landis 2018), and of partisanship (Rosenblum 2008;Muirhead 2006;White and Ypi 2016;Efthymiou 2018), have been joined by others showing how parties and partisanship can help manage pluralism (Bonotti 2017;Bellamy et al 2019) as well as a burgeoning literature investigating whether parties should be internally democratic (Wolkenstein 2016;Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017;Wolkenstein 2020;Bagg and Bhatia 2021). So how have political theorists conceived of the value of partisanship for democracy?…”