What Is Partisanship?

Partisanship is, as we have seen, a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it deepens divides that lead to political stalemates. On the other hand, it also motivates participation in democracy, especially in today’s atmosphere. Farrell has observed that partisanship, in some ways, has “saved” citizenship because it has increased participation – at the cost of consensus. He emphasizes, “The rebirth of civic participation this year [2008] is not a product of experiments in deliberative democracy or a new interest in league bowling. Rather, it is based on party politics, coupled with and accelerated by new opportunities provided by the Internet” (Farrell, 2008). Farrell ultimately concludes that increased participation necessarily means increased
Political discussions of issues where people strongly disagree are less likely to result in consensus than in winners and losers” (Farrell, 2008). This essay discusses party identification within the lens of Farrell’s observation in order to argue that Farrell’s observation is, in light of recent writing and research on the topic, somewhat simplistic, although it nonetheless sheds light on an important topic.
One of the major benefits of partisanship is the alleged increase in voter turnout. For example, Nagler describes demographic changes in terms of voting patterns in the United States. Nagler sees policy as something of a self-fulfilling prophecy since to a large extent, it determines turnout
Partisanship, as they found, creates a self-selection bias in terms of the information people tend to seek out and the lens through which people filter information (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). These authors found that “corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group” (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). This provides support for the idea that people seek out information that confirms their beliefs. Partisanship, as mentioned above, begets partisanship. Even when corrections are provided in terms of misinformation provided by preferred political groups, these “…corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question” (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010, p. 303; emphasis in original). Therefore, political identification as expressed through partisan or political party identification is somewhat damaging. Someone looks at the world through Democratic, Republican, or Libertarian-tinted glasses. To the extent that partisan identification represents ideology, this is understandable: ideology has been likened to a lens. However, it is hardly comforting from the perspective of citizenship, which mandates a well-informed and open-minded citizenry capable of making objective decisions about voting, not discarding information that does not neatly fit into their ideological beliefs. Although the authors are quick to point out the limitations of their sample size in the