Eduardo Martinez

This paper presents a diagnosis of current concerns about democratic performance and fragility: the civic attention monopoly. We argue that the concentration of civic attention on a narrow set of highly salient issues and sites of policymaking could limit democratic performance and contributes to democratic fragility. We develop a novel framework that explains how this civic attention problem arises from both demand and supply dynamics related to political information and communication, and demonstrates its concerning epistemic and political consequences. The potential rise of asymmetric distribution of collective civic attention could limit the epistemic and political performance of democracies and promote conflict escalation and a bellicose view of politics, thereby undermining democratic resilience and affecting both the ceiling and the floor of democratic performance. The paper offers an alternative interpretation of the epistemic crisis of democracy, illuminating a relevant yet underexplored dynamic, while also having broader implications for democratic theory and political epistemology.

This contribution to the special issue on Robert Talisse’s Civic Solitude argues in favor of seeing personal and relational approaches to remediating polarization as being complimentary, not antagonistic. I summarize Talisse’s argument in favor of atopia, which describes a highly personal response to polarization that does not emphasize engagement with others, and discuss how this practice has some additional benefits for different types of civic diversity and creativity. I then present a challenge for both personal and relational approaches to remediating polarization based on the selection effects of participation and note that pursuing both strategies simultaneously mitigates this challenge and provides a promising means of leveraging the benefits of each approach.

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.