On Partisan Compromise

• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Date: 01 February 2019
• Author: Daniel Weinstock
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717744285
• Subject Matter: Review Symposium: On Partisanship

744285PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717744285Political TheoryReview Symposium
review-article2018
Review Symposium: On Partisanship
Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(1) 90 –96
On Partisan Compromise
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591717744285
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Daniel Weinstock1
In The Meaning of Partisanship, Jonathan White and Lea Ypi provide us with
a compelling and brilliantly argued vision of why parties (still) matter to
contemporary democracies. Briefly stated, they hold that parties and parti-
sanship are important both for the democratic system as a whole, and for the
individuals who have made commitments to political parties as partisans.
What I want to suggest in these brief remarks is that these two sets of
good-making properties that White and Ypi emphasize pull apart to a greater
degree than they recognize. That is, the properties of political parties that
make them particularly important elements of a democratically run polity are
different from those that make them good for individuals. The kinds of par-
ties that are optimal from the point of view of the realization of the goods
associated with justification are not the same kind that we look for to realize
the goods of partisanship. This fact is nowhere more apparent than in their
treatment of the question of the circumstances in which, and the degree to
which, partisans should be amenable to compromise. To make this point, I
will proceed as follows. First, I will briefly lay out what I see as the two main
sets of justification for political parties that White and Ypi put forward in the
book. Second, I will show that, at least under certain sets of circumstances,
the goods that some individuals may seek in their taking on the role of parti-
san may be difficult to achieve in modern political parties. The main reason
is that political parties are paradigmatic spaces of compromise. This will
allow me to show in a third section of this commentary that the reasons that
the authors adduce in order to argue against inter-party principled compro-
mise are weakened if one takes seriously the need for political compromise
within political parties.
1Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Daniel Weinstock, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 3644 Peel st., Montreal, Qc. H3A 1W9,
Canada.
Email: Daniel.weinstock2@mcgill.ca

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I
How are political parties good for democracy, according to White and Ypi?
Briefly, political parties are, on the view that they defend, crucial to the task
of democratic justification. Though rooted in particular, contestable views
about what the morally most urgent tasks of political life should be, views
that may historically be rooted in the experiences of particular segments of
society, such as workers, farmers, or members of a particular region, political
parties, to the extent that they aspire to have a share in the exercise of collec-
tive self-rule, parties must put forward programs that appeal beyond a narrow
constituency, and that are grounded in reasons that are shareable rather than
parochial. A group that is rooted in a particular social location, but whose
way of presenting itself never transcends the circumstances of its origins, is a
faction rather than a party.
According to the view developed in the book, two key features make par-
ties particularly suited to serve a key institutional role in public justification.
First, parties that seek to govern must reach out beyond their original constitu-
ency, and articulate the concerns of that constituency in ways that resonate
with more generalizable interests. Thus, they are led quite naturally to making
proposals in the public arena that aspire to justification. As White and Ypi
aptly put it, “central to processes of justification is the systematic generation
of principled...