Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-88psn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-19T16:20:03.167Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Defense of Party Spirit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2006

Russell Muirhead
Russell Muirhead
Affiliation:
Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin (E-mail: muirhead@mail.utexas.edu)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 713 - 727
Copyright
2006 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Abromowitz, Alan, and Kyle Saunders. 1998. Ideological Realignment in the U.S. Electorate. The Journal of Politics 60 (3): 634–52.Google Scholar
Aldrich, John. 1995. Why Parties?Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba. 1965. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
American National Election Studies. Party Identification 7-Point Scale, 1952–2002. http://www.umich.edu/∼nes/nesguide/toptable/tab2a_1.htm, NES Guide To Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, NES website.
APSA Committee on Political Parties. 1950. Toward A More Responsible Two-Party System. American Political Science Review 64 (3), Part 2 (September): i-xii, 1–99.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1993 [1967]. Truth and Politics. In Between Past and Present. New York: Penguin.
Banning, Lance, ed. 2004. Liberty and Order: The First American Party Struggle. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Bartels, Larry. 2000. Partisanship and Voting Behavior, 1952–1996. American Journal of Political Science 44 (1): 35–50.Google Scholar
Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. Two Concepts of Liberty. In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bolingbroke, Viscount. 1997a [1733]. A Dissertation on Parties. In Political Writings, ed. David Armitage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bolingbroke, Viscount. 1997b [1738]. The Idea of a Patriot King. In Political Writings, ed. David Armitage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burke, Edmund. 1999 [1770]. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. In Select Works of Edmund Burke, ed. E. J. Paine. Volume 1. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. 1960. The American Voter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chait, Jonathan. 2003. Mad About You. The New Republic, September 29.
Cohen, Joshua. 1997. Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy. In Deliberative Democracy, eds. James Bohman and William Rehg. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Coleman, John J.2003. American Political Parties and the APSA Report after Fifty Years. In The State of the Parties, ed. John C. Green and Rick Farmer. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Connolly, William. 1993. The Terms of Political Discourse. 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dalton, Russell J., and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds. 2000. Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dimaggio, Paul, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson. 1997. Have Americans' Social Attitudes Become More Polarized? In Cultural Wars in American Politics, ed. Rhys H. Williams. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Disch, Lisa Jane. 2002. The Tyranny of the Two-Party System. New York: Columbia University Press.
Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Addison-Wesley.
Eilperin, Juliet. 2006. Fight Club: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Eilperin, Juliet, and Albert Crenshaw. 2003. House Democrats Storm Out of Ways and Means Committee: Chairman Calls Capitol Police to Restore Order. Washington Post, July 18.
Evans, John H.2002. Have Americans' Attitudes Become More Polarized—An Update. Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies Working Paper #24, Spring.
Ferguson, Adam. 1995 [1767]. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fiorina, Morris P., with Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope. 2005. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. New York: Pearson Longman.
Fishkin, James. 1991. Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Freeman, Samuel. 2000. Deliberative Democracy: A Sympathetic Comment. Philosophy and Public Affairs 29 (4): 371–418.Google Scholar
Goldie, Mark. 1989. Ideology. In Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell Hansen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodnow, Frank J.2003 [1900]. Politics and Administration: A Study in Government. New Brunswick: Transaction.
Greenberg, Stanley B.2004. The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It. New York: St. Martin's.
Grynaviski, Jeffrey D.2004. “Party Activists and the Ideological Polarization of American Parties.” Unpublished paper on file with author.
Gunn, J.A.W.1971. Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth Century England. London: Frank Cass.
Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 1996. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harris, Tim. 1993. Politics Under the Later Stuarts. London: Longman.
Habermas, Juergen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. 1961 [1787–88]. The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter. New York: NAL Penguin.
Hegel, G.W.F.1977 [1807]. The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness. In Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller, with foreword by J.N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hetherington, Marc. 2001. Resurgent mass partisanship: The role of elite polarization. American Political Science Review 95 (3): 619–31.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1991 [1651]. Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holmes, Stephen. 1995. Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Huberman, Jack. 2004. The Bush-Hater's Handbook. Nation Books.
Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle To Define America. New York: Basic Books.
Jefferson, Thomas. 1997 [March 13, 1789]. To Francis Hopkinson. The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Penguin.
Johnson, James. 2006. Political Parties and Deliberative Democracy. In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William J. Crotty. London: Sage.
Jones, Jeffrey M.2004. Public Divided on Bush: Great Partisan Differences in Job Approval. In Gallup News Service, March 10. Princeton: Gallup Organization.
Jones, Jeffrey M.2003. Measuring the Strength of Opinion on Bush's Job as President. In The Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing, September 30. Princeton: Gallup Organization.
Key, V.O.1942. Parties, Politics, and Pressure Groups. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
Kommers, Donald P.1997. The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, 2d trans. and ed. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Lijphart, Arend. 1999. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Locke, John. 1988 [1690]. Second Treatise of Government, ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lowell, A. Lawrence. 1926. Public Opinion and Popular Government. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Lowi, Theodore J.1975. Party, Policy, and Constitution in America. In The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development, ed. William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1996 [1531]. Discourses on Livy, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Madison, James. 1981 [1792]. A Candid State of the Parties. In The Mind of the Founder, ed. Marvin Meyers. Hanover NH: Brandeis University Press.
Mansfield, Harvey C.1965. Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1972 [1872]. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Richard C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton.
McWilliams, Wilson Carey. 1980. Parties as Civic Organizations. In Party Renewal in America: Theory and Practice, ed. Gerald M. Pomper. New York: Praeger Publishers.
Michels, Robert. 1962. Political Parties. New York: The Free Press.
Mill, John Stuart. 1964 [1873]. Autobiography. New York: Signet Classics.
Mill, John Stuart. 1969a [1838, 1859]. Bentham. In Collected Works: Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, vol. 10. Toronto: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mill, John Stuart. 1969b [1840]. Coleridge. In Collected Works: Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, vol. 10. Toronto: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mill, John Stuart. 1989 [1869]. On Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mill, John Stuart. 1991 [1861]. Considerations on Representative Government. In On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. New York: Routledge.
Ostrogorski, M.1922 [1902]. Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. Vol. 2. Trans. Frederick Clark. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Plattner, Mark F.2001. The trouble with parties. Public Interest 143: 27–44.Google Scholar
Plonowska Ziarek, Ewa. 2001. An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Pollock, Paul K.1982. Is The Federalist anti-party? The Political Science Reviewer XII (Fall 1982) 79–97.Google Scholar
Pomper, Gerald M.1992. Passions and Interests: Political Party Concepts of American Democracy. Lawrence KS: University of Kansas Press.
Ranney, Austin. 1962. The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government. Urbana: University of Illinois.
Rawls, John. 1996. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rawls, John. 1999. The idea of public reason revisited. In Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Remini, Robert V.1959. Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rosenblum, Nancy L.2005. “Partisan Faith,” unpublished paper on file with author.
Sabato, Larry J., and Bruce Larson. 2002. The Party's Just Begun: Shaping Political Parties for America's Future. Second Edition. New York: Longman.
Schattschneider, E.E.2004 [1942]. Party Government. New Brunswick: Transaction.
Schumpeter, Joseph A.1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Shepsle, Kenneth A., and Mark S. Bonchek. 1997. Analyzing Politics: Rationality, Behavior, and Institutions. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Stonecash, Jeffrey M., Mark D. Brewer, and Mack Mariani. 2003. Diverging Parties. Cambridge: Westview Press.
Thoreau, Henry David. 1996 [1849]. Resistance to Civil Government. In Political Writings, ed. Nancy Rosenblum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2000 [1835, 1840]. Democracy in America, ed. and tr. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Villa, Dana. 2001. Socratic Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Waldron, Jeremy. 1999. The Dignity of Legislation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walzer, Michael. 2004. Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
White, John Kenneth. 1992. E. E. Schattschneider and the Responsible Party Model. PS: Political Science and Politics 25 (June): 167–71.Google Scholar
White, John Kenneth. 2003. The Values Divide. New York: Chatham House Publishers.
Willis, Clint. 2004. The I Hate Bush Reader. Thunder's Mouth Press.
Wilson, Woodrow. 2002 [1900]. Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics. 15th ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Wolfe, Alan. 1998. One Nation After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About. New York: Penguin.