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

IF 4 1区 社会学 Q1 POLITICAL SCIENCE Perspectives on Politics Pub Date : 2023-12-06 DOI:10.1017/s153759272300289x
Kevin J. Elliott
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Abstract

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, is identity, but many individuals do not identify with parties. Rather, they relate to parties in terms of psychological closeness or 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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党派是什么样的?党派主义的衡量标准及其对民主的价值
当游击队员是什么感觉?个人如何体验他们与政党的关系?今天,无论是在流行话语中还是在许多政治科学中,最常见的答案都是身份认同,但许多个人并不认同政党。更确切地说,他们与聚会的关系是心理上的亲密或亲近感——他们不会像标识符那样说“我们”,而是说“他们”。在这篇文章中,我认为,通过认识到这是个人依附于政党的两种根本不同的方式,以及这些不同的经历在当今大多数民主国家共存,党派关系的实证和规范研究都将得到改善。承认党派关系的这种基本多元性将纠正目前实证研究中将党派关系同质化为认同或亲近的倾向,从而避免伪造许多属于相反类别的公民的经验。此外,在两极分化的背景下,它可以帮助打破关于如何执行党派关系的二元和对抗性思维,并使公众对如何成为党派的理解多样化。认识到党派关系的多元性也会促进党派关系规范性理论的爆发,这些理论在南希·罗森布鲁姆(Nancy Rosenblum)、拉塞尔·穆尔黑德(Russell Muirhead)、乔纳森·怀特(Jonathan White)和利亚·伊皮(Lea Ypi)等学者的开创性工作中得到了发展。我展示了身份和党派关系的亲密性——以及它们之间的相互作用——如何对这些学者的党派关系理论产生变革性的影响,要么促进了这些理论,要么威胁了它们。本文旨在改进党派关系的概念化,并在政治科学的规范和经验调查之间建立有益的接触模型。
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来源期刊
Perspectives on Politics
Perspectives on Politics POLITICAL SCIENCE-
CiteScore
6.00
自引率
5.30%
发文量
313
期刊介绍: Perspectives on Politics is a journal of broad interest to scholars across many fields, in addition to professional political scientists, political analysts, policy makers, and the informed public. Essays synthesize and extend significant research and developments in all dimensions of political science scholarship. In many cases, the journal aims to connect research findings, conceptual innovations, or theoretical developments to real problems of politics.
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