Can partisans be pluralist? A comparative study of party member discourse in France and Hungary
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120930597 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120930597
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2021, Vol. 23(1) 22 –42
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148120930597
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Can partisans be pluralist? A
comparative study of party
member discourse in France
and Hungary
Lise Esther Herman
Abstract
Pluralist norms, which prescribe certain attitudes of openness and mutual respect for diverging
views, have long been considered a central pillar of liberal democracy. While democratic theorists
have championed these values, they have been conflicted as to the capacity of political parties to
carry them. Partisanship is widely recognized as an essential institution of democratic regimes
but it has also been traditionally associated with intransigence rather than tolerance. This paper
investigates this theoretical debate from an empirical standpoint, asking whether partisans can be
carriers of pluralist values. It relies on focus-group methodology and software-assisted textual
analysis to evaluate the extent to which the discourse of 117 party members in two different
national contexts, France and Hungary, resonates with the pluralist worldview. The results of this
study provide key empirical insights into the nature of partisanship, demonstrating wide variations
in the extent to which partisans uphold pluralist principles, but also their capacity to do so at a
stringent level.
Keywords
focus group methodology, France, Hungary, liberal pluralism, normative political theory,
partisanship
Pluralist values have been central to liberal democratic thought from the writings of John
Stuart Mill to contemporary applications of deliberative democratic theory (for an over-
view, see Galston, 2002). A pluralist orientation may be defined as an account of the
political world whereby a multiplicity of understandings of the common good are consid-
ered as legitimate and worthy of expression in the public sphere. It thus prescribes certain
attitudes of reciprocity, openness and mutual respect, in situations of political disagree-
ment (Gutmann and Thompson, 1996). While normative democratic theorists have long
Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Corresponding author:
Lise Esther Herman, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter
EX4 4RJ, UK.
Email: l.herman@exeter.ac.uk
930597BPI0010.1177/1369148120930597The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsHerman
research-article2020
Original Article
Herman 23
been insistent on the importance of these values, they have also expressed strong suspi-
cion towards the capacity of political parties – central to the functioning of liberal demo-
cratic regimes – to be carriers of this pluralist ideal (for an overview see Ball, 1989;
Hofstadter, 1969; Rosenblum, 2008). Instead, starting with the 18th century criticisms by
Bolingbroke of the evils of ‘faction’ up to Rawls’ contemporary dismissal of the ‘great
game of politics’ (Muirhead and Rosenblum, 2006), political thinkers have shunned the
divisive influence of political parties on society, rooted in the intransigent and partial
nature of the partisan passion.
In the past decade, a number of democratic theorists have aimed to rehabilitate parti-
sanship as a normative category, and thus account for what ‘good partisanship’ entails in
democratic societies (Bonotti, 2012, 2014, 2019; Bonotti et al., 2018; Herman, 2017;
Herman and Muirhead, 2020; Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein, 2017; Muirhead, 2006,
2014; Muirhead and Rosenblum, 2006; Rosenblum, 2008; Stojanović and Bonotti, 2019;
White, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; White and Ypi, 2010, 2011, 2018; Wolkenstein, 2016a,
2016b, 2018, 2019). Against the long-standing belief that partisanship, defined here as an
array of discourses and practices in support of a certain vision of the common good
attached to partisan identification (Herman, 2017), is necessarily vector of intolerance
and division, one of the central contentions of this literature is that partisanship is compat-
ible with a pluralist orientation. At their best, pluralist partisans exert restraint with regard
to their own convictions and recognise that there exist other legitimate interpretations of
what constitutes the common good than their own.
This paper explores the empirical implications of this normative debate, interrogating
how we could recognise pluralist partisanship in political practice, and the degree to
which it constitutes an attainable ideal for real-world partisans. For this purpose, I con-
duct a micro-level comparative study of party members discourse in two different national
contexts, France and Hungary. Adapting the criteria I previously established to study
pluralist commitments in political discourse (Herman, 2017), this study relies on focus-
group methodology to analyse the ways in which a total of 117 party members understand
political disagreement and relate to their political opposition in the main centre-left and
centre-right partisan organisations in France and Hungary.
The results of this exploratory study provide key insights into the nature of partisan-
ship, demonstrating wide variations in the extent to which partisans uphold the principles
of political pluralism, but also their capacity to do so at a stringent level. The paper more
generally contributes to the field of party studies by providing innovative theoretical and
methodological tools to analyse a key dimension of the democratic performance of politi-
cal parties: their capacity to advance norms of political tolerance. Finally, it advances
democratic theory by offering evidence that pluralist partisanship is not an unattainable
ideal, thus nuancing long-standing assumptions in political philosophy on the necessarily
intransigent and divisive character of the partisan passion.
The remainder proceeds as follows. I first discuss the importance of pluralist commit-
ments in normative democratic theory and highlights disagreements among theorists on
the extent to which partisans can be carriers of pluralist ideals. The next section discusses
the research design and methodology for this study, including criteria for operationalizing
pluralist orientations among partisans. This is followed by the empirical analysis itself.
The paper concludes with a discussion of the results and suggests avenues of future
research.
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