Partisanship and the ethics of citizenship
An important body of literature has documented, and sometimes lamented, the decline of partisanship over the last few decades. Party membership and partisan identification seem to have decreased significantly, while skepticism towards partisan politics has increased among populations of consolidated democracies. However, as I argue in a recent article, while some aspects of this evolution are worrisome, it is unclear that we should regret the age of massive partisan loyalty. While parties may be essential to a well-functioning democracy for a diversity of reasons, partisanship, understood as the sustained commitment by citizens to a particular political party, is more ambivalent. In other words, parties may be more valuable than partisanship.
To see this, we need to consider the role citizens are expected to play in democratic systems as they currently exist. The classical theory of democratic representation expects political parties to formulate comprehensive political platforms to attract citizens’ votes and secure the political power necessary to implement their plans through public policy. Citizens, in turn, are expected to inform themselves about competing platforms and choose the one they find most appealing. They are then expected to check whether their representatives, once elected, have kept their promises, assess whether there are acceptable reasons why they have not, and decide whether to renew their trust in them or vote for another party. If widely adopted, this voting ethic would promote popular accountability, as citizens’ scrutiny compels representatives to anticipate a potential sanction and justify their actions (or inactions). It would also promote the responsiveness of the representative system by encouraging representatives to adapt to shifts in public opinion and to try to meet voters’ expectations.
Now, if that is the role that citizens are supposed to play, we can ask whether a sustained identification with a particular party will help them or hinder them in this task. Partisans are obviously not all gregarious fans who would follow their leaders blindly. And people may feel close to a party without fully identifying with it. However, the more people identify with a party, and the more they are committed to it, the less likely they are to perform their task adequately. Even if partisans are open-minded and critical of their preferred party, committed non-partisans, i.e., citizens with an interest in politics, values they are committed to, but without party ties, seem to be in a better position to identify relevant reasons to vote differently. Because several options are genuinely open to them, they are less likely to vote out of habit, less likely to blindly defer to some party leaders, and less likely to turn a blind eye to one of these parties’ failures. Sanctioning the party they voted for the last time will be psychologically less costly to them. Hence, in a polity with committed yet not partisan voters, the accountability mechanism is likely to work better, producing more responsiveness.
Furthermore, partisan commitment can have some undesirable effects from a deliberative perspective as well. It is now well established that ideologically homogeneous groups generally tend to reinforce each member’s preexisting biases and produce cascading disinformation effects. Parties are certainly not entirely homogeneous groups. They are also, to some extent, spaces for deliberation—and sometimes for heated confrontation between opposing viewpoints. Nevertheless, their ideological diversity is always strongly limited by a common agreement on certain basic principles or beliefs. Consequently, since they are mostly exposed to convergent discourse, partisans tend not to take divergent views as seriously as they might and become more resistant to correcting factual errors. And this affects the overall quality of political judgments feeding into the decision-making system.
The upshot is that we might be better citizens by keeping some distance from political parties: a willingness to support the most promising one at election time, but an equal willingness to withdraw one’s support if needed.
A few qualifications are nonetheless required. Let me focus on three of them, which go partly beyond the article on which I draw.
First, for a party-based political system to function properly, we need a sufficient number of partisans who dedicate themselves to keeping the parties alive or who create new ones when the party system has become stagnant and in need of renewal. But it is neither necessary nor desirable for most citizens to do so. There is a beneficial division of labor between the minority of citizens who engage in parties offering competing political platforms and the majority of citizens who act as arbiters.
Second, one of the key benefits of mass political parties was that they fostered long-term engagement in a collective project. This stands in stark contrast to the era of “hyperpolitics”, characterized by high-intensity but highly ephemeral engagements (a series of mass demonstrations or strikes, such as Black Lives Matter, the Climate Strikes, or the Yellow Vests), after which everyone returns to their private lives. However, parties are not the only groups capable of fostering long-term engagement and preventing individualistic withdrawal. Being involved in a union or an association and, within that framework, regularly participating in demonstrations or other concrete collective actions can help citizens stay politically informed, build connections, and maintain political hope and motivation, while maintaining an open and critical attitude toward different political options.
Third, the situation looks very different from one party system to another. In a two-party political system, equidistance towards different potentially appealing parties is simply not available to voters because the options are so limited and unlikely to be both compatible with their deeper normative commitments. Thus, the case for being an independent voter may be much weaker in such systems. In the US context, for example, the independent attitude might evoke an indifference between two considerably different political projects, which would be hard to defend ethically. It is, therefore, no surprise that most normative defenses of partisanship have been developed by scholars working in countries with a two-party or two-and-a-half-party system. Since, in these contexts, independence can be an indicator of political indifference or of a cognitive difficulty in identifying morally significant differences between the competing projects, it is less normatively attractive. However, while it makes much more sense for someone who cares about social justice to join a party or identify with one in a two-party system, the institutional implication of the argument developed above is that, from an ethics of citizenship perspective at least, we should prefer multiparty systems because they make it easier for citizens to play their monitoring role adequately. And in multiparty systems, it is probably better for most citizens to remain largely independent from parties, while appreciating their democratic value.
