The democratic production of political cohesion : partisanship, institutional design and life form

Online: 27 November 2018What binds a democratic society together? This would seem a well-rehearsed topic in modern political theory, but on closer scrutiny, it may appear less so. If we reformulate the question, it may become clearer why: what binds democratic society together? The emphasis on ‘democratic’ is the clue here. Much recent discussion on the cohesive force in democracies has been parasitic on other debates, such as that between cosmopolitans and communitarians on justice as the first virtue of society; that between nation-state-based and post-national views of contemporary politics or that about the cultural aspects of democratic citizenship as the glue that makes democracy work. All such views and debates tend to assume a somewhat ‘externalist’ perspective, so to speak, of the problem of cohesion in democracies. Cosmopolitans and liberal communitarians have argued over the relative importance of values and identity as the basis for the stability of a just society, whose legitimate political arrangements they generally agree must be democratic, so as to reflect the demands of equality and self-government. Disputes over whether the institutions of democracy still require the background conditions provided by the nation-state, with its consolidated networks of party system, solidarity, civil society organisations and public opinion formation, or whether similar conditions can be reproduced at a more trans- and post-national level, are very similar in scope to those between cosmopolitans and liberal communitarians. Both these disputes concern the social, institutional, ideal or identitarian pre-conditions of democracy, which help it to work with a modicum of stability, in so far as they guarantee the political cohesion of either the demos or the regime itself. Discussions over the quality and competence of citizenship look at democratic culture as an important condition for democratic institutions and procedures to function smoothly and effectively. Debates over the ‘civic culture’ in the 1960s and more recently on ‘social capital’ lay emphasis on a mixture of attitudes, practices, participation in associational networks and consolidated norms of sociability as formative components of democratic citizenship, on which the working of democratic institutions and rules depends. This suggests something more internal, or at least a virtuous circle between the culture and the institutions of democracy. But is democracy itself capable of producing political cohesion, and on what basis