Partisanship, polarization, and political identity

This dissertation develops a normative account of partisanship sensitive to the challenges of polarization in contemporary democracies. I join recent theorists in defending the value of partisanship for democratic politics, but I do so in a different way. The first part of the project argues that many recent accounts objectionably idealize from elements of real-world partisanship, and that, consequently, their normative prescriptions are silent on the most pressing problems in real-world democracies (Chapter 1). Injecting a dose of methodological self-consciousness into the new partisanship literature, I defend an alternative idealization strategy. Chapter 2 proposes a richer account of political contestation, theorizing partisanship as a distinctive form of identity. But, drawing on work on the politics of difference, I assuage worries that such a view necessarily impinges on agency or promotes zero-sum conflict. I show how a particular kind of partisan identity could, in fact, support political agency, while lending philosophical heft to the intuition that something goes wrong when politics and social life collapse together. The dissertation's second part further explores the normative implications of this view. I turn, in Chapter 3, to the intra-party relationship. I show how, given certain qualifications, parties can combat political alienation by inculcating the democratic virtues of solidarity and belonging while avoiding charges of exclusion that have long followed defenses of such virtues. Chapter 4 considers the relationship across party lines and asks what citizens of diverse, divided democracies must share. I show how my view of partisan identity makes available an attractive account of political cohesion for divided societies. I premise citizenship not on shared identity or shared beliefs, but on shared action among politically interdependent citizens – action of which partisanship is a principal form.