Abstract
Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.
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Notes
By ‘political parties’ I intend voluntary organizations which channel citizens’ demands into the public political realm in order to influence the political agenda, place candidates in elections and often (but not always) aim to obtain control of government (e.g. see Downs 1957, pp. 24–5; Sartori 1976, p. 63).
Rawls defines the ‘burdens of judgment’ as ‘the many hazards involved in the correct (and conscientious) exercise of our powers of reason and judgment in the ordinary course of political life’ (Rawls 2005a, p. 56). These may include the difficulty of assessing evidence and its weight in drawing conclusions, the indeterminacy of all our concepts and the fact that our values are shaped by our personal experience.
‘Public reason’ is defined by Rawls as ‘the reason of equal citizens who, as a collective body, exercise final and coercive power over one another in enacting laws and in amending their constitution’ (Rawls 2005a, p. 214).
I borrow the expression ‘ethics of partisanship’ from Muirhead and Rosenblum (2006, p. 102).
Similarly, Cohen highlights, in Confucianism human rights arise ‘from the demands of…[familial and social]…duties and an account of the worth of human beings that is tied to their fulfilling social responsibilities’ (Cohen 2004, p. 206). In Islam, instead, the distinctions between law and human interpretation and between human responsibility and God’s responsibility (both of which, Cohen shows, are supported by specific passages in the Qu’ran) may provide arguments for justifying ‘wider assurances of basic rights, as conditions of membership and of the appropriate exercise of responsibility, rather than for extending them only to those who have what are presumed to be correct beliefs, as given by some interpretation of shari’ah’ (Cohen 2004, p. 209).
Certainly, it may be observed, with the exception of few fundamentalist religious parties, most religious parties (e.g. the Christian Democrats in Western European polities) do not justify their policy goals exclusively on the basis of religious values or theology. At most, when they do not avoid providing any justification at all for their policy goals, they invoke a combination of both religious and secular arguments. In response to this remark, however, it should be noted that the basic principles of Western European Christian Democratic parties (e.g. personalism, subsidiarity and federalism) have traditionally been grounded in Christian doctrine and Catholic social teaching and that ‘without the basis of Christianity a true form of Christian Democracy could not develop’ (Sturzo 1947, p. 6). Similarly, the Basic Programme of the European People’s Party (EPP), a transnational European party which comprises Christian Democratic parties from European Union (EU) member states, emphasizes ‘the link…between…Christian values based on the Gospel and Christian cultural heritage and…the democratic ideals of freedom, fundamental equality between men, social justice and solidarity’ (European People’s Party 1992, par. 163).
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Acknowledgments
I am especially grateful to Lynn Dobson, Cécile Fabre and Cécile Laborde for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank Andrea Baumeister and Rowan Cruft for giving me the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper at the Northern Political Theory Association (NPTA) Annual Conference, Iris Murdoch Centre, University of Stirling, 20 February 2009. Finally, I would like to thank the editors of Res Publica and two anonymous reviewers for their enlightening comments on the draft of this paper.
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Bonotti, M. Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism. Res Publica 17, 107–123 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-010-9138-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-010-9138-7