Response: The Democratic Case for Partisanship

• Published date: 01 February 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717744744
• Author: Lea Ypi,Jonathan White
• Date: 01 February 2019
• Subject Matter: Review Symposium: On Partisanship

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717744744

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(1) 106 –113

© The Author(s) 2018

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0090591717744744

journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

Review Symposium

Response: The

Democratic Case

for Partisanship

Jonathan White1 and Lea Ypi1

The Meaning of Partisanship is a book that restores the place of parties in

political theory.1 It approaches partisan practices both from an external per-

spective, focused on their distinctive place in wider processes of democratic

justification, and from an internal perspective, focused on the ethics of activ-

ism and its contribution to political commitment.

Our interlocutors rightly point out that our account is markedly different

from other recent perspectives, most notably those of Nancy Rosenblum and

Russell Muirhead.2 Unlike their contributions, the argument of our book is a

democratic rather than a liberal one. It interprets parties and the associative

practices underpinning them as an essential component of the process by

which political power can be endowed with legitimacy. Our account, of

course, is not hostile to elements emphasised by these liberal alternatives.

Like Muirhead, for example, we acknowledge the role of partisan loyalty in

supporting political commitment. And like Rosenblum, we emphasise the

importance of partisanship in channelling political disagreement into forms

of regulated rivalry. But while these alternative accounts take issue with an

ideal of deliberation that seeks to develop shared standards of public reason-

giving, partisanship for us is not only compatible with and constrained by

these standards but also a practice that contributes to them.

In our account, parties differ from factions precisely in their ability to

articulate principles and aims that meet deliberative criteria for reason-giv-

ing, that is, general and reciprocal justifiability. For our liberal critics, this

raises the question of the compatibility between such an ideal stance on jus-

tification (a commitment to reasons that can be shared or, in the case

of partisanship, to principles and aims that claim to be generalizable and

1London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

Corresponding Author:

Jonathan White, European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science,

Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.

Email: j.p.white@lse.ac.uk

744744PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717744744Political TheoryReview Symposium

review-article2018