Partisan Justification

DOI10.1177/0090591717744745
Date01 February 2019
Published date01 February 2019
Subject MatterReview Symposium: On Partisanship
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717744745
Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(1) 82 –89
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591717744745
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Review Symposium: On Partisanship
Partisan Justification
Russell Muirhead1
A book of sweeping scope, White and Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship
extends the political theory of partisanship to a range of important new areas:
the distinctive obligations that partisans owe each other, whether partisans
should be ready to compromise (no, they argue), and whether the defense of
partisanship extends beyond constitutional confines to include revolutionary
partisanship (yes). In addition to these, White and Ypi defend partisanship in
a new way—in particular, for the service it renders to “the circumstances of
justification.”1
Justification refers to a mode of legitimation at the heart of the delibera-
tive democratic ideal. To see this, it is helpful to appreciate the background
against which a number of us, including Nancy Rosenblum and me, came to
argue that democratic theory, and deliberative democratic theory in particu-
lar, needs to take stock of parties and partisanship.2 We pro-party theorists
resisted the suggestion in the early wave of deliberative democratic theoriz-
ing that deliberation would reduce—or perhaps, ideally, eliminate—disagree-
ment. One can hear this suggestion in John Rawls’ essay on public reason,
where he says that in a society that shares “public reasons given in terms of
political conceptions of justice,” conflicts about fundamental social, eco-
nomic, and political interests “need not arise, or arise so forcefully.”3
Pro-party theory rather follows the insight of the second wave of delibera-
tive democratic theorizing, which denies that deliberation would necessarily
reduce the scope or intensity of disagreement. Cass Sunstein, for instance,
showed how under certain social and institutional conditions, enclave delibera-
tion can produce convergence—but views often converge on a more extreme
point relative to what people though before the deliberation.4 Sometimes the
increase in disagreement is a function of group dynamics that good institutional
1Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
Corresponding Author:
Russell Muirhead, Department of Government, HB6108, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
03755, USA.
Email: james.russell.muirhead.jr@dartmouth.edu
744745PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717744745Political TheoryReview Symposium
review-article2017

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