Abstract
Political parties seem inclined to dogmatism. Understanding party politics via a plural-subject account of collective belief explains this phenomenon. It explains inter-party outrage at slight deviations from the party line and dogged refusals to compromise. It also aligns with an alternative theory of political representation. I argue that party dogmatism is unlikely to change and can be a democratic good. I conclude that not parties but patriots counteract the democratic ills of dogmatic party politics.
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Notes
Officially the “Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction” or the Supercommittee was created by the Budget Control Act of August, 2011. It consisted of three Senate Democrats, three Senate Republicans, three House Democrats, and three House Republicans. The committee was given the task of reducing the national budget by $1.5 trillion over a 10-year period. After negotiating for nine months, the committee announced it had failed to reach a budgetary agreement.
Some may oppose my example on the grounds that in this particular case, one party was more clearly uncompromising than the other. That may be so, but my point does not depend on this. All I am trying to show is that sometimes, political parties are uncompromising, and this poses problems for democracies. You can accept this even if you do not think the example is the best illustration.
I find another insight from Schattschneider apt, “We delight in words such as responsibility, but there can be no responsibility without power.” (1942) We may have certain responsibilities as individual citizens, such as the responsibility to do what we believe to be best for our country, but we cannot always do what we believe is best without power. The compromise may be to join with others. Collectively, we do not necessarily do what we believe is best but what we believe good enough. In party coalitions, we sacrifice our personal ideological purity for the power found in numbers.
In this paper, I focus on the party system within the US. Part of what I say is interchangeable with other party systems, other parts are not. But even when what I say is not interchangeable directly with a given country’s party system, it may be relevant to other political institutions (NGOs, special interests, etc.).
Sociologist Anthony Quinton supported a simple version of the summative account. According to Quinton, “To ascribe mental predicates to a group is always an indirect way of ascribing such predicates to its members. With such mental states as beliefs and attitudes the ascriptions are of what I have called a summative kind. To say that the industrial working class is determined to resist anti-trade union laws is to say that all or most industrial workers are so minded” (1975–6: 17, see also 9). The common knowledge condition is supposed to make Quinton’s view more plausible. In opposition to Quinton, Gilbert’s account is more along the lines of Emile Durkheim’s one (Durkheim and Durkheim 1895). Durkheim suggested a collective belief must be “external to individual consciousness.” See Gilbert (1989), chapter 5 for further discussion of Durkheim on collective belief.
The obligations here are directed obligations that correlate with claim rights. Because the right-holder has a claim against the other, failing to fulfill an obligation gives the right-holder the standing to rebuke. A rebuke is a punitive measure demanding special authority. Cf. Hart (1961).
See Gilbert 2008 140–1.
For Gilbert, if two or more individuals form a collective belief they are necessarily a plural-subject. Institutions often seem paradigmatic examples of plural subjects, since these groups commonly form collective beliefs. 1990, 10)
I do not mean to claim that my account is a complete explanation of dogmatic tendencies. Many factors are involved. For example, political scientists, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, argued that the uncompromising nature of democracies can be explained in terms of campaign cycles, “Why is compromise on major issues so hard in democratic politics when no one doubts that it is necessary? We argue that a significant source of the resistance to political compromise lies in the democratic process itself. The increasing incursion of campaigning into governing in American democracy—the ‘permanent campaign’—encourages political attitudes and arguments that make compromise more difficult.” (2010, 1125) An account like this is not only consistent with my account, but might be complimentary. For example, they argue that, “The resistance to democratic compromise is anchored in what we call an uncompromising mindset, a cluster of attitudes and arguments that encourage standing on principle and mistrusting opponents.” (2010, 1125) What I seek to explain is this very phenomenon, that is, the nature of these uncompromising mindsets and clusters of attitudes. Elsewhere, Gutmann and Thompson admit that, “The influence of campaigning is not necessarily greater than other factors that make compromises more difficult, such as increased polarization and the immense influence of money in democratic politics. But the mindset associated with campaigning deserves greater attention than it has received…”(2010, 1125) I admit something similar; the influence of collective beliefs is not necessarily the only thing that explains dogmatism, nor even the greatest thing, but it deserves more attention than it has receive. (As far as I know, it has not received any attention.)
Gutmann and Thompson described the ‘uncompromising mind-set’ of partisan politics as consisting of two characteristics, “principled tenacity, which resists the sacrifice that compromise entails, and mutual mistrust, which inflates the willful opposition that compromise involves” (1130, 2010). The plural-subject account explains the former in terms of collective belief. Partisans have a principled reason to be tenacious: they owe their party members this tenacity because they have committed jointly to the collective belief. Distrust is more complicated. At times, partisans may trust the opposing party, but fail to engage in compromise because of obligations to fellow party members. Other times, a sense of real distrust may develop as the opposing party is not part of a joint commitment. Partisans have a reason to trust their own party members (a sense of commitment) but this sense of commitment is absent in respect to the opposing party.
Political theorists have made the theoretical distinction between individual obligations and party obligations. For instance, Ranney argues that, “The individual candidate must be sunk to a large extent in the party. Individual responsibility must give place to party responsibility” (1954).
See Gilbert, “Modeling Collective Belief” (1987) and “On Social Facts” Chapter 5. For an extensive study on the influence of political parties on individual beliefs, see Cohen 2003. The empirical experimentation shows that party belief has a greater influence over individual belief than policy content or ideology do.
For the purposes of this paper, I use the terms “belief” and “view” interchangeably.
In suggesting this, and in what follows, I am in conflict with certain aspects of what is called the ‘responsible party model’ in political science. “Responsible party advocates do not like stalemate, and see political parties as a means to break the dead-lock. To them, parties have a unique role in American politics, co-opting what Schattschneider called the “ramshackle” institutions created by the Founding Fathers so that they might work” (White 1992, 169). I do not see political parties as a means to break the deadlock (although this sometimes happens). Rather, individual party members going against the view of the group break the deadlock.
Gutmann and Thompson discuss a similar problem when accounting for the difficulty of political compromise: “[S]ignaling a willingness to compromise on specific policies before your opponents offer anything in return is obviously not a strategy designed to achieve the most you can reasonably win in the legislative negotiations to come. This is not only a strategic imperative but also a moral requirement. Candidates have a responsibility to their followers to increase the chances of achieving what they promise…” (2010, 1128)
Not surprisingly, the default assumption seems to be that dogmatisms is bad. This is the assumption not only of many political theorists, but also the public. For a detailed analysis of public opinion toward political parties and dogmatism, see Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (1995).
“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Winston Churchill, speech at the House of Commons, London, England, 1947.
Stephen Nathanson (1989) argues that, “…patriots feel some concern for those who are not their fellow countrymen. One can have a preference for one’s own country, a greater love for it, and a greater concern for its well-being without going so far as to think that morality ceases to apply at the border.” I do not want to discuss the morality of patriotism here, but I do want to note that by being a patriot, I mean the agent is acting as one who has a special concern for the well-being of his own county. However, I want to contrast this special concern not with concern for other nations, as is usually done; rather this special concern with country is to be contrasted with concern for party. When someone is acting qua patriot, in my sense, his is acting with primary concern for the good of his country (or what he owes his country) and only secondary concern to the good of his party (or what he owes his party).
Political theorists have made similar distinctions. Recall Ranney, “The individual candidate must be sunk to a large extent in the party. Individual responsibility must give place to party responsibility” (1954). What I want to add to this distinction is that individual responsibility must give place to party responsibility because of the obligations incurred via collective belief. They ‘must’ give way not because giving way is best for the country but because fellow party member have a right that they give way.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my deep thanks to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to include a discussion on institutions. I am also grateful to Marcello Fiocco, Margaret Gilbert, and Jeffery Helmreich, for help with revising this paper.
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Priest, M. Party Politics and Democratic Disagreement. Philosophia 42, 137–149 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9470-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9470-1