Theme Panel: Parties, Partisanship, and the People: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

August 18, 2025 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: Parties, Partisanship, and the People: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation

Participants:

  • (Chair) Natasha Piano, UCLA
  • (Discussant) Emilee Chapman, Stanford University
  • (Discussant) Natasha Piano, UCLA

Session Description:
This Theme Panel brings together historical, contemporary, and comparative perspectives in political theory to reimagine three key conceptual categories at the core of democratic politics: parties, partisanship, and peoplehood.

Over the past two decades, and even more so after the Covid-19 pandemic, Western democracies have witnessed the exacerbation of socioeconomic inequalities and the inability of mainstream parties to effectively voice the disaffection and claims of broad portions of the citizenry. The hyperpolarization of domestic politics, the toxic rise of ‘conspiracy thinking’, and the endangering of liberal democratic pluralism has contributed to the sweeping success of right-wing, nationalistic, and xenophobic populisms, promising to bring “the People” back into politics and politics back to “the People”. The shifting axis of a new political geography of party systems (globalists/nationalists rather than Left/Right) has increased electoral volatility and opened windows of opportunity to anti-establishment movements across the political spectrum. Accelerating these transformations has been a structural fact of contemporary politics: every democracy operates today within a global order largely shaped by international institutions and marked by challenges that demand globally coordinated strategies – a condition that has easily triggered hatred against transnational technocracies and their allegedly apolitical appeals to science and expertise in multiple realms (healthcare, technology, the environment, etc.). Finally, Western liberal democracies have been increasingly challenged by alternative political models consolidating in Asia and Far Eastern Europe, heralding authoritarianism as the most effective way to govern globalization and respond to the failings of liberal democratic regimes.

Our panel, directly inspired by the theme statement of APSA 2025, assembles a diverse pool of junior and senior scholars to shed new light on these challenges in contemporary democratic theory and practice. It does so by drawing on the insights – historical, conceptual, and normative – of burgeoning bodies of political theory literature on parties, partisanship, and peoplehood and by weaving together perspectives from Western and non-Western traditions.