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What Kind of Identity is Partisan Identity? “Social” versus “Political” Partisanship in Divided Democracies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2022

JAY RUCKELSHAUS Open the ORCID record for JAY RUCKELSHAUS [Opens in a new window]
JAY RUCKELSHAUS*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
*
Jay Ruckelshaus, PhD student, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, john.ruckelshaus@sjc.ox.ac.uk.
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Abstract

Many scholars blame partisan polarization for collapsing politics into social life. But these diagnoses lack any sophisticated theoretical basis for distinguishing “social” from “political” forms of identity. This article offers such a framework, providing better grounding for evaluating polarization. Drawing on work on the politics of difference, I first argue that the harms of polarized partisanship mirror long-standing criticisms of essentialist social identities, including the constriction of agency and reduction of compromise. I then show how a more political form of partisan identity could not only mitigate these concerns but also positively contribute to democracy through the promotion of civic republican ideals of active citizenship. I conceptualize partisan identity between the view of the social-identity literature (partisanship as cultural identity) and an idealizing tendency within some recent normative views (partisanship without identity), offering a novel evaluation of polarization and a conceptual map useful for both empirical and normative scholars.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 116 , Issue 4 , November 2022 , pp. 1477 - 1489
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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