Democracy vs Partisanship?: Understanding Regime Contention in the United States

• In Event: New Perspectives on Parties and Partisanship

Abstract

A steady stream of books and articles have warned that the American public is turning away from democracy. Several works have found a shift in attitudes on democracy, with several identifying partisanship as an essential factor in these shifts (Graham and Svolik 2020; Ladd et al. 2018; Drutman et al. 2018). Others have found related trends but with greater intensity among Republicans (Bartels 2020, Carey et al 2019), arguing similarly that partisan affiliation is working against democracy. As important as it is to understand public opinion on these matters, this paper seeks to problematize the “democracy vs. partisanship” framing employed in such studies. It is a framing which pits democratic ideals against partisan self-interest and seeks to assess whether or not the public’s democratic commitments can overcome their desire for political gain or the influence of party leaders. Drawing on works that have maintained the mutually constitutive nature of interests and ideals (Wendt 1992; Hall 1989; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Smith 2003; 2015), I argue that the democracy vs. partisanship framing mistakes an essential feature of democratic politics, which is always already partisan. This problem of framing becomes a problem of analysis in these studies as it introduces a great deal of ambiguity in the measures used to assess commitments to democratic ideals. This ambiguity suggests that the public may not be abandoning democracy but responding to leaders who emphasize different democratic principles. That they do so for political gain does not diminish the fact that they do indeed appeal to democratic principles. All this points to an alternative understanding of the problem in which the very idea of democracy is the terrain of political contestation and regime contention.


Works cited:

Carey, John M., Gretchen Helmke, Brendan Nyhan, Mitchell Sanders, and Susan Stokes. 2019. “Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency.” Perspectives on Politics 17 (3): 699–718.

Drutman, Lee, Larry Diamond, and Joe Goldman. 2018. “Follow the Leader: Exploring American Support for Democracy and Authoritarianism.” Democracy Fund Voter Study Group.

Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink. “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change.” International Organization, vol. 52, no. 4, 1998, pp. 887–917.

Graham, Matthew and Milan Svolik. 2020. “Democracy in America?” American Political Science Review (2020) 114, 2, 392–409.

Hall, Peter. 1989. The Political Power of Economic Ideas. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ladd, Jonathan M., Joshua A. Tucker, and Sean Kates. 2018. “2018 American Institutional Confidence Poll: The Health of American Democracy in an Era of Hyper Polarization.” Georgetown University Baker Center.

Smith, Rogers. 2015. Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Rogers. 2003. Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Memberships. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wendt, Alexander. 1992. “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics.” International Organization, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 391–425

Author

• Amel F. Ahmed, University of Massachusetts, Amherst