Eduardo Martinez

In this paper, I provide an argument in favor of flexible partisanship in response to concerns about the shortcomings of contemporary partisanship. I develop a taxonomy of four democratic tasks for partisanship based on existing accounts of its democratic value and argue that these tasks stand in tension under contemporary circumstances. I then distinguish between two forms of flexibility, policy and identity flexibility, and argue that the two can be complementary and reenforcing in some cases. I use this account of partisan flexibility to raise concerns about some of the standards proposed by preexisting accounts of partisanship, which I argue are overly constraining in their prescriptions of specific forms of comprehensiveness and integrity, and distinguish flexibility from related notions of deliberative and collusive partisanship. I then demonstrate how the concept of flexible partisanship can provide useful action guidance in response to current partisan dysfunction with both institutional and interpersonal means of enacting flexible partisanship.

Each chapter of this dissertation develops a standard with which to evaluate and guide the improvement of a different node of a democratic system. In the first chapter, I consider the relationship between citizens, their environment, and the formal infrastructure of democracy. The standard for this node is democratic health, which is a feature of the social epistemic environment in which citizens operate. I argue that a democratically healthy environment is one that is conducive to the development of citizens’ epistemic capacities to reason and communicate about their interests. I then demonstrate how political phenomena such as polarization pose social epistemic challenges to democratic health and argue that an epistemic conception of civic virtue can guide efforts to improve it. In the second chapter, I consider the relationship between representatives and their constituents under non-ideal conditions. The key standard for this node is systemic interest-responsiveness. I argue that observed public opinion and citizens’ values, commitments, and goals can stand in tension, and that representative democracies must be responsive to both factors. On this basis, I argue in favor of pairing independent administrative agencies with expanded forms of public input. In the third chapter, I consider how civic education can promote epistemic civic virtue. The key standard I develop here is the social epistemic public good. I argue that civic education can provide social epistemic benefits through its civic exchange function, which enables citizens to learn about the views and traditions of other citizens, and prepares them to effectively communicate with diverse others. Furthermore, I argue that this function can be pursued in the absence of widespread agreement about which values civic education should promote.