Russell Muirhead

A Defense of Party Spirit

Amid the resurgence of party spirit in the U.S., partisanship retains its bad name. Often branded an expression of inherited prejudice, narrow interest, or dogmatic commitment, it seems at odds with good citizenship. In what form, if any, is partisanship something admirable? This question has been neglected by political theorists, whose ideals of democracy, justice, and citizen virtue rarely depict the proper place of partisanship. I offer an account of the ethics of partisanship that shows how party spirit is defensible, even admirable—and how it is troubling, even pathological. Russell Muirhead is Associate Professor in the Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin (muirhead@mail.utexas.edu). I would like to thank Sam Beer, Sharon Krause, Joseph Lambert, Glyn Morgan, Nancy Rosenblum, Mark Somos, Dennis Thompson, Jeremy Waldron, and the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful written comments on drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the participants of the Yale Political Theory workshop for their comments.

CAN DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY BE PARTISAN

Abstract Any workable ideal of deliberative democracy that includes elections will need modern democracys ever-present ally, parties. Since the primary function of parties is to win office rather than to reflect on public questions, parties are potential problems for the deliberative enterprise. They are more at home in aggregative models of democracy than in deliberative models. While deliberative democracy will need its moments of aggregation—and therefore, must have parties—partisans as they actually arise in the political world possess traits that undermine the deliberative ideal. If partisans of partisanship are to be unembarrassed by (or are to correct) these defects, even workable ideals of deliberative democracy need to stand at some distance from the partisan imperative.

The Politics of Getting It Right

ABSTRACT Hélène Landemores Democratic Reason marks a crucial achievement in democratic theory, as it successfully shows that democracy is about more than procedural legitimacy—and that it should be. Nonetheless, the procedural argument remains at the heart of the case for democracy. For many democratic decisions, getting the right answer is not what we ask of political institutions. Politics is often about defining what counts as a problem, and no single definition counts as the right one. Furthermore, the epistemic claim that democracy is likely to get moral questions right can obscure the difficulty of getting moral questions exactly “right.” The best political approach to controversial questions is often to strike a balance of competing claims, and every actual democracy does this in ways that leave many citizens dissatisfied. This is why many citizens participate in democratic politics as partisans: they put more trust in their party than in the democratic regime to get it right. Partisanship fuels the never-ending democratic contest over what it means to get it right in politics, but it is also appropriately epistemic, in that it is prompted by the never-ending possibility that even democracy will get things wrong.

The Partisan Connection

We are sympathetic to the institutional innovations Leib and Elmendorf propose, and to the concept of democracy at the heart of their recommendations. They resist the opposition of “popular democracy” and “party democracy,” and their models of reform ingeniously blend the two. Popular democracy attempts to realize the imperative that “the people should rule” by engaging “the people” directly in the legislative activity of government. This activity includes initiatives, referenda, recalls, and party primaries—familiar Progressive institutions that aim to popularize democracy. Party democracy, by contrast, relies on the opposition of rival parties to render government accountable to a citizenry that in turn steps into its authority only at election time. Legitimate opposition, campaigns, elections, and the peaceful transfer of power are the familiar practices of party government. In conventional terms, party democracy and popular democracy are rivals. As Leib and Elmendorf tell it, the institutions of popular democracy were intended to curtail and ultimately eclipse party democracy. Popular primaries were intended to curb the entrenched power of party bosses, for instance. Similarly, other popular reforms like the Australian ballot were meant to cleanse politics

The Epistemic Basis for Political Opposition: Rejoinder to Min

ABSTRACT As Min argues, any defense of democracy must include an epistemic element. But this does not mean that the will of the majority always tends to be right. It means only that we cannot identify in advance a minority that is likelier to get it right than everyone else. This fact is consistent with the possibility, even the likelihood, that the majority will more often be wrong than right. Those who find themselves in the minority should not be cowed into submission by the overall epistemic advantage of democracy: in any given case, a dissenter from the majority view may be right. Likewise, institutions such as parties are crucial in allowing minorities—and majorities—to persevere. Not only parties, but practices of dissent and opposition more broadly, are inseparable from the epistemic case for democracy.

Speaking Truth to Conspiracy: Partisanship and Trust

ABSTRACT What we call the “partisan connection”—the bridge parties build between the people and the formal polity—entails sympathizing with citizens’ suspicions and fears (though not recklessly stoking them). However, loosening the partisan connection and “speaking truth to conspiracy” is sometimes a moral and political imperative when conspiracy charges come from party leaders’ constituents and fellow partisans. We consider epistemological challenges that make it difficult to assess whether conspiracy claims are warranted, and we consider political challenges to assessing the validity of conspiracy claims that are posed by the secrecy, misleading partial truths, obscurantism, and lying that are endemic to politics. Finally, we propose three standards for responsible party officials to use when judging whether to oppose conspiratorial claims: when they are fueled by hatred of certain groups; when they represent the opposition as treasonous and illegitimate; and when conspiracism extends to authority generally, especially expert authority, thereby undermining the basic work of government decision making.