Partisanship (Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder)

Last update: 08 Dec 2024 00:35
First version: 10 December 2018

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That is, organizing politics around contending political parties, especially ones with broad membership and emotional involvement. (I am thus less interested in mere factions among the aristocracy / oligarchy / hierarchy, which are universal, and one-party states, which lack the element of contention. [Though it is an interesting question why one-party states feel the need to have a party.])

Ancient examples: The Blues and Greens in the circus at Rome and Constantinople. Medieval: Guelfs and Ghibellines in Italy; Hooks and Cods in Holland. Whigs vs. Tories in Britain after 1688? Emergence of modern parties.

It seems pretty clear that in many times and places, party membership tracks other social classifications pretty well --- but which ones, when? When does it cut across other social categories? When does it come to be felt as a primary social category in its own right, rather than as a derivative one?

--- It would be idle to pretend that this interest doesn't largely come from trying to understand what the hell's going on in my own country these days.

See also: Democracy; Networks of Political Actors; Political Elites

Recommended (obviously inadequate):
• Daniel W. Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas
• Henry Farrell, "On Post-Democracy"
• Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing-out of Western Democracy
• John Levi Martin, Social Structures
• Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, "The Hollow Parties", pp. 1250--152 in Frances E. Lee and Nolan McCarty (eds.), Can America Govern Itself?
• Paul M. Sniderman, The Democratic Faith: Essays on Democratic Citizenship

Modesty forbids me to recommend:
• Henry Farrell and CRS, "Cognitive Democracy"

To read:
• Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, "Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization" [PDF]
• Cory J. Clark, Calvin Isch, Jim A.C. Everett, Azim Shariff, "Even When Ideologies Align, People Distrust Politicized Institutions", psyarxiv/sfubr (2023)
• Cedric de Leon, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tuğal (eds.), Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society
• Morris P. Fiorina and Samuel J. Abrams, "Political Polarization in the American Public", Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 563--588
• Sara Wallace Goodman, Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat
• Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph, Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis
• Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean J. Westwood, "The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States", Annual Review of Political Science 22 (2019)
• Daniel Kreiss, "The fragmenting of the civil sphere: How partisan identity shapes the moral evaluation of candidates and epistemology", American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5 (2017): 443--459
• Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, The Other Divide: Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics
• Michael Laver and Ernest Sergenti, Party Competition: An Agent-Based Model
• Simon Levin, Helen V. Miller and Charles Perrings, "The dynamics of political polarization", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (2021): e2116950118 [Introduction to a "special feature" in the journal; I'm using this as placeholder for the whole thing]
• Liliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
• John Medearis, Why Democracy Is Oppositional
• Russell Muirhead, The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age
• Diana C. Mutz, In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media
• Tasha S. Philpot, Conservative but Not Republican: The Paradox of Party Identification and Ideology among African Americans
• Nancy L. Rosenblum, On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship
• Sam Rosenfeld, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Modern Era [Interview with Henry Farrell]
• Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself
• Robert B. Talisse, Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side
• Ben M. Tappin, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand, "Thinking clearly about causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning: why paradigmatic study designs often undermine causal inference", Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 34 (2020): 81--87
• Emily Van Duyn, Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret