What Is It Like to be a Partisan? Measuring Partisanship & Its Democratic Value

• In Event: Between Trust and Contestation

Abstract

Recent work in democratic theory emphasizes the importance of political parties and partisanship for democracy. This research has illuminated the many vital services that parties yield for democracy, yet it has also tended to neglect the conceptualization of partisanship. Rather than inquire into what it means to be a partisan, political theorists have uncritically adopted the dominant paradigm for understanding partisanship from political science. This paradigm is based exclusively on social identity, wherein partisanship is about one’s self-conception and belonging to certain social groups. Conceived of this way, partisanship has been linked to powerful and disturbing pathologies such as polarization, gridlock, and democratic backsliding which beset contemporary democracies. This seems to threaten the value that theorists have posited partisanship to have. I argue that a close examination of empirical measurements of partisanship disclose another possible way for individuals to relate to parties: in terms of psychological closeness or proximity, rather than identity. This suggests that there are a plurality of ways that people can relate to parties, including at least in terms of identity and of how close one feels to a party, and so we might therefore distinguish two types of partisans: identity partisans and closeness partisans. I argue that a plurality of partisanships—where both types coexist—best reflects the diversity of ways that citizens experience partisanship. Though there are those who experience every rise and fall of their party as a personal gain or loss (identity partisans), there are also those who maintain a personal distance from their party and can easily imagine defecting to a worthy competitor (closeness partisans). Moreover, by closely examining the political theories of partisanship in the works of Nancy Rosenblum, Russell Muirhead, Lea Ypi, and Jonathan White, I show that this plurality better captures the value of partisanship for democracy than the dominant paradigm, particularly in polarized conditions. This plurality of partisanships helps unlock an additional service performed by partisanship for democracy of helping it to organize plurality and enmity in ways that are democratically tractable.

Author

• Kevin J. Elliott, Murray State University