In Defense of Partisanship in Deliberations

Political partisanship is often seen as an obstacle to the rational exchange of reasons required for deliberation (Muirhead 2014: 80-99). Partisanship functions as a form of social identity, and just like other social identities, partisanship fosters in-group biases (Iyengar et al. 2019: 130). On the one hand, political partisans are cognitively prone to motivated reasoning, where they favour information that aligns with their identity while dismissing or rationalising away contradictory information (Kahan 2015; Vegetti and Mancosu 2020). On the other hand, political partisans are behaviourally less likely to publicly concede counterarguments and to accept compromises (Davis 2019; Iyengar and Westwood 2015). Given this tension between partisanship and deliberation, some deliberative democrats have entertained the idea of dispensing with political parties and partisanship altogether (Guerrero 2014). In this paper, I argue that deliberative democrats should actually embrace, rather than dispense with, political parties and partisanship. In the absence of political partisanship, deliberating agents will still reveal ingroup biases based on other social identities, such as race, ethnicity or class. Partisanship need not make things worse. On the contrary, partisanship provides a unique social identity that can unite members of different social groups. When political parties bring members of different social groups together under a partisan identity, they create so-called ‘cross-pressures’ for them: Their partisan and other identities pull them in different directions. These cross-pressures reduce the intensity of feeling with which the identities are held. As a consequence, it becomes less likely for members of those groups to fall pray to motivated reasoning and show an unwillingness to make compromises (cf. Goodin 1975; Rae and Taylor 1970: 85-89). Political parties clearly do not always create such cross-pressures. When political parties become socially sorted, they typically increase the intensity of feeling with which social identities are held and heighten social conflict (McCoy and Somer 2019). Instead, a political party creates cross-pressures when it seeks political support across a line of conflict politicised by other political parties. That is, when it politicises cross-cutting cleavages. For example, in the Netherlands in the 1960s, the two major class-based parties brought together Protestants and Catholics under a partisan identity and thereby bridged the religious divide that the two dominant religious parties had politicised (Dahl 1966: 379). The role that political parties and partisanship can play in mediating in-group biases has implications for both the ethics of partisanship and electoral design. First, ethical partisanship is considered to involve inclusivity, comprehensiveness, compromise-willingness and loyalty (Muirhead and Rosenblum 2020: 105-106). I suggest that virtuous partisan activity must also include a disposition to seek cross-cutting lines of conflict and mobilise diverse identity groups. Second, we may not only want to rely on virtuous partisans but also want to create the incentive structures necessary to protect the deliberative ideal. Changes to the electoral system may be necessary to create the conditions under which partisanship can encourage a rational exchange of reasons, as required in a deliberative democracy.