Partisanship Beyond Parties

What is partisanship? This paper develops a conceptualisation intended to grasp partisanship not only as a set of empirical practices but as a normative idea that describes those practices in their most defensible form. To make progress on both dimensions - the empirical and the normative – requires that one move beyond a focus on partisanship as membership in a political party or stable voting allegiance to one. While criteria of the latter kind were a productive focus for political scientists over the course of the twentieth century (albeit often also the premise for highly reductive accounts of partisanship), in the light of more recent social and political change such criteria no longer reflect the focal-points of contemporary partisan activity. Nor can such a conception accommodate the normative questions that arise when membership boundaries are unsettled – questions e.g. to do with inter-partisan obligations, legitimate defection, the founding of new parties, and forms of transnational partisanship – as well as the background issues having to do with the place of partisanship in a theory of democracy. Accordingly, the proposed paper examines what belongs in a definition of partisanship once one decouples it from organisational membership and behavioural loyalty. The argument is situated in relation to existing conceptions of partisanship in political science and theory, on which it seeks to build.