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On a Columnar Self: Two Senses of Expressing Partisanship

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Abstract

According to the partisan cheerleading view, numerous political disagreements that appear to be genuine are not authentic disputes, because partisans deliberately misreport their beliefs to show support for their parties. Recently, three arguments have been put forth to support this view. First, contemporary democracies are characterized by affective rather than ideological polarization. Second, financial incentives indicate that partisans often deliberately misreport their beliefs to express their attitudes. Third, partisans have inconsistent and unstable political beliefs, so we should not take these attitudes seriously. In this paper, I examine these arguments and present an alternative view, which I call the partisan conviction view. According to it, partisans are not necessarily insincere in their political judgments, and they are in genuine disagreement.

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Notes

  1. There is a third option, according to which individuals do hold the professed beliefs, but they do so just for signaling purposes (see, for instance, Funkhouser 2020 and Williams 2021). I will leave this view out of this paper because, despite its nuances, it can be understood as a form of cognitivism for the purposes of this paper.

  2. This is a literal transcription from the movie.

  3. Note that this increase in our level of confidence can be understood as an affective attitude to the extent that it is action-guiding, but crucially because it involves an increased attachment to a certain political identity.

  4. See Pew Research 2020 [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/14/as-the-u-s-copes-with-multiple-crises-partisans-disagree-sharply-on-severity-of-problems-facing-the-nation/].

  5. This is a literal transcription from the movie.

  6. Partisans might still be rational in another sense: they might be rational enough to know the truth but nevertheless intentionally misreport their beliefs for strategic gain. In such a case, they would be rational even if they defend positions which they do not have good arguments for. I thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for raising this point.

  7. I thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for pressing me to be as clear as possible on this point.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Eric Berg, David Bordonaba, Cristina Corredor, María José Frápolli, Ivar Hannikainen, Yuhan Liang, Michael Lynch, Ana Muros, Katie Peters, Manuel de Pinedo, Andrés Soria, Robert Talisse, Jason Tosta, Katrina Van Dyke, Neftalí Villanueva, and two anonymous reviewers, as well as audiences at talks in Granada, New Orleans, Salamanca, and UConn, for their comments, discussions, and suggestions.

Funding

This work was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities and Next-Generation EU, the Spanish Ministry of Science (PID2019-109764RB-I00), Junta de Andalucía (B-HUM-459-UGR18), the BBVA Foundation (BBVA2021-EQUIPOS, AYUDAS FUNDACION BBVA 2021, project: OPIDPOLA), and the FiloLab Group of Excellence funded by the University of Granada.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Manuel Almagro

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Correspondence to Manuel Almagro.

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Almagro, M. On a Columnar Self: Two Senses of Expressing Partisanship. Res Publica 30, 509–527 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09641-z

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