The Circumstances of Partisan Deliberation

This chapter aims to provide a tentative answer to the question of whether party members are at all capable of engaging in non-coercive dialogical exchanges of arguments that result in concrete political proposals, let alone sustained critiques of some existing proposal. It looks specifically at the ‘circumstances of deliberation’ at the party base, asking whether the local partisan associations in which party members engage provide the conditions that are necessary for reasonably non-coercive and dialogical deliberation to arise, namely that participants have equal opportunities to influence the deliberative process, and that they hold a variety of different viewpoints that ensure that the issue under deliberation is considered from multiple angles. The chapter argues that these desiderata are indeed satisfied, showing that diversity is ensured by members’ different occupational backgrounds, and that partisans’ joint commitment to shared political ideals establishes an egalitarian ‘deliberative field’ in which everyone’s voice is heard. These are, it is suggested, very favourable conditions for deliberation, even if one applies much higher normative standards than the book does. Interestingly, the fact that partisanship involves having common adversaries—a by-product of having shared normative commitments—also contributes to the equal standing branch members enjoy; so, partisanship’s inherent exclusionary dynamics have the happy effect of rendering branches supportive environments for deliberation.