Whither Parties? Hume on Partisanship and Political Legitimacy

Landis, Joel E.

doi:10.1017/s0003055417000545

Cited by 15 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…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?…”

Section: The Value Of Partisanship In Political Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Elliott

2023

Perspect. polit.

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What is it like to be a partisan? How do individuals experience their relationship to political parties? The most common answer today, both in popular discourse and much political science, isidentity, but many individuals do not identify with parties. Rather, they relate to parties in terms of psychologicalclosenessor affinity—they do not say “we” about the party, as do identifiers, but rather “they.” In this article, I argue that both the empirical and normative study of partisanship would be improved by recognizing that these are two fundamentally different ways for individuals to be attached to parties and that these distinct experiences coexist within most democracies today. Acknowledging this basic plurality of partisanships would remedy the current tendency among empirical studies to homogenize partisanship as either identity or closeness and so would avoid falsifying the experience of many citizens who fall into the opposite category. In polarized contexts, moreover, it could help break up dualistic and antagonistic thinking about how to perform partisanship and diversify public understandings of how to be a partisan. Recognizing the plurality of partisanships would also improve the explosion of normative theorizing about partisanship found in the ground-breaking work of scholars like Nancy Rosenblum, Russell Muirhead, and Jonathan White and Lea Ypi. I show how identity and closeness partisanship—and the interaction between them—have transformative consequences for each of these scholars’ theories of partisanship, either furthering or threatening them. The article aims to improve the conceptualization of partisanship and to model a salutary engagement between normative and empirical inquiry within political science.

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Section: The Value Of Partisanship In Political Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Elliott

2023

Perspect. polit.

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“…If anything, Hume judged Montesquieu to have been too sanguine about the potential for British party strife to be fatally destabilizing (Skjönsberg 2021, 183–84). The long-standing preponderance of the Whigs following the Hanoverian settlement led Hume to worry that partisan factionalism, if not checked, could plunge Britain back into the turmoil of the seventeenth century (Forbes 1975, 136, 202–4, 220–22, 227, 267, 309–10; Hanvelt 2012, 18–20; Landis 2018; Skjönsberg 2021, chap. 7; Sabl 2012).…”

Section: New and Robust: Hume On The Liberty Of The Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Liberty of the English: Adam Smith’s Reply to Montesquieu and Hume

Sagar

2021

Political Theory

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This essay has two purposes—first, to identify Adam Smith as intervening in the debate between Montesquieu and Hume regarding the nature, age, and robustness of English liberty. Whereas Montesquieu took English liberty to be old and fragile, Hume took it to be new and robust. Smith disagreed with both: it was older than Hume supposed, but not fragile in the way Montesquieu claimed. The reason for this was the importance of the common law in England’s legal history. Seeing this enables the essay’s second purpose: achieving a more thorough and nuanced understanding of Smith’s account of liberty. This requires us to go beyond repeating Smith’s famous claim that modern liberty was the result of the feudal barons trading away their wealth and power for inane status goods. As I demonstrate, this is only one part of a much wider story: of liberty requiring, and also being constituted by, the rise of the regular administration of justice, and ultimately the rule of law. Although Smith’s history of the English courts and common law has been almost entirely neglected by scholars, it is indispensable to understanding both his reply to Montesquieu and Hume and his wider political theory of modern freedom.

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“…For an exception, seeRosenbluth and Shapiro (2018).3 Methodologically, my project is most similar to that ofLandis (2018), who similarly seeks to expose potential benefits of parties missed by overidealization, specifically within the context of David Hume's thought.…”

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confidence: 99%

What Kind of Identity is Partisan Identity? “Social” versus “Political” Partisanship in Divided Democracies

RUCKELSHAUS

2022

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Many scholars blame partisan polarization for collapsing politics into social life. But these diagnoses lack any sophisticated theoretical basis for distinguishing “social” from “political” forms of identity. This article offers such a framework, providing better grounding for evaluating polarization. Drawing on work on the politics of difference, I first argue that the harms of polarized partisanship mirror long-standing criticisms of essentialist social identities, including the constriction of agency and reduction of compromise. I then show how a more political form of partisan identity could not only mitigate these concerns but also positively contribute to democracy through the promotion of civic republican ideals of active citizenship. I conceptualize partisan identity between the view of the social-identity literature (partisanship as cultural identity) and an idealizing tendency within some recent normative views (partisanship without identity), offering a novel evaluation of polarization and a conceptual map useful for both empirical and normative scholars.

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Whither Parties? Hume on Partisanship and Political Legitimacy

Cited by 15 publications

References 47 publications

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

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

On the Liberty of the English: Adam Smith’s Reply to Montesquieu and Hume

What Kind of Identity is Partisan Identity? “Social” versus “Political” Partisanship in Divided Democracies

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