Adversarial politics, civic virtues and partisanship in Eastern and Western Europe

The literature on democracy and democratization regards partisanship as one of the best indicators of the rootedness of party systems and, indeed, of liberal democracy itself (Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Huntington 1968; Rose and Mishler 1998; Morlino and Montero 1995). Accordingly, the absence of long-term emotional attachments to parties is seen as a worrying sign of the fragility of representative democracy. ¹ Yet the central role attributed to partisanship rests on a number of implicit assumptions about the role of parties in integrating citizens into the democratic order. In order to assess the validity of these assumptions we need to know more about the causes and effects of partisanship or, at the very least, about the relationship between partisanship and other political variables.