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Introduction: Parties, partisanship and political theory

As E. E. Schattschneider once remarked, political parties are ‘the orphans of political philosophy’ (Schattschneider 1942, p. 10). It is surprising that despite the growing number of scholars dealing with the normative dimensions of partisanship, some of whom have contributed to this volume, parties still remain somehow at the margins of contemporary political philosophy. Is this a problem? And why should political philosophers and theorists care about parties? This special issue aims to provide some preliminary answers to this question. There are a number of reasons why it is important for political philosophers and theorists to focus on parties and partisanship at present. These reasons mainly concern the changes that have characterized parties and party politics over the past 30 years in most Western liberal democracies and which continue to raise pressing normative questions. Many of those changes are well summarized by Veit Bader in this issue. They include the decline of party membership (and, more generally, of the mass parties that used to be central to representative democracy in the Western world), the increasing professionalization and oligarchization of party politics (often perceived as detached from the everyday life and interests of ordinary citizens), and the increasing absence of significant programmatic differences among parties. Do parties still matter? These changes, as Bader shows, have increasingly urged citizens in liberal democracies to pursue political engagement through a variety of (non-partisan) social movements, through social media and through various forms of (both rightand left-wing) populism. While political scientists have extensively analysed these changes from an empirical perspective, political philosophers and theorists need to ask whether such changes are regrettable but inevitable or what could possibly be done to stem them based on the assumption that the decline of partisanship implies the loss of something inherently valuable, i.e. a particular ethos and a kind of political engagement that may be more desirable for liberal democracies than the abovementioned alternative channels of political participation.