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Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Associations and the Moral Anxieties of Liberalism -- PART ONE: PLURALISM AND LIBERAL EXPECTANCY -- One: Civil Society: Getting the Dangers Right -- Two: The Morality of Association -- PART TWO: VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS -- Three: Religious Associations: Constitutional Incongruence -- Four: Corporate Culture and Community at Home -- Five: Compelled Association: Democratic Equality and Self-Respect -- Six: Membership and Voice -- Seven: Secret Societies and Private Armies: Conspiracism and Clear and Present Danger -- Eight: "Fusion Republicanism" and Paramilitary Paul Reveres -- Nine: Identity Groups and Voluntary Association: Filling in the Empty Politics of Recognition -- Conclusion: Navigating Pluralism: The Democracy of Everyday Life -- Notes -- Index

"Love thy neighbor" is an impossible exhortation. Good neighbors greet us on the street and do small favors, but neighbors also startle us with sounds at night and unleash their demons on us, they monitor and reproach us, and betray us to authorities. The moral principles prescribed for friendship, civil society, and democratic public life apply imperfectly to life around home, where we interact day to day without the formal institutions, rules of conduct, and means of enforcement that guide us in other settings. In Good Neighbors, Nancy Rosenblum explores how encounters among neighbors create a democracy of everyday life, which has been with us since the beginning of American history and is expressed in settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives and in novels, poetry, and popular culture. During disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, the democracy of everyday life is a resource for neighbors who improvise rescue and care. Degraded, this framework can give way to betrayal by neighbors, as faced by the Japanese Americans interned during World War II, or to terrible violence such as the lynching of African Americans. Under extreme conditions the barest act of neighborliness is a bulwark against total ethical breakdown. The elements of the democracy of everyday life--reciprocity, speaking out, and "live and let live"--comprise a democratic ideal not reducible to public principles of justice or civic virtue, but it is no less important. The democracy of everyday life, Rosenblum argues, is the deep substrate of democracy in America and can be its saving remnant.

Political parties are the defining institutions of representative democracy and the darlings of political science. Their governing and electoral functions are among the chief concerns of the field. Yet most political theorists--including democratic theorists--ignore or disparage parties as grubby arenas of ambition, obstacles to meaningful political participation and deliberation. On the Side of the Angels is a vigorous defense of the virtues of parties and partisanship, and their worth as a subject for political theory. Nancy Rosenblum's account moves between political theory and political

Political parties are the defining institutions of representative democracy and the darlings of political science. Their governing and electoral functions are among the chief concerns of the field. Yet most political theorists ignore or disparage parties as grubby arenas of ambition, obstacles to meaningful political participation and deliberation. On the Side of the Angels is a defense of the virtues of parties and partisanship, and their worth as a subject for political theory. Nancy Rosenblum's account moves between political theory and political science, and she uses resources from both fields to outline an appreciation of parties and the moral distinctiveness of partisanship. She draws from the history of political thought and identifies the main lines of opposition to parties, as well as the moments of appreciation. Rosenblum then sets forth her own theoretical appreciation of parties and partisanship. She discusses the achievement of parties in regulating rivalries, channeling political energies, and creating the lines of division that make pluralist politics meaningful. She defends "partisan" as a political identity over the much-vaunted status of "independent," and she considers where contemporary democracies should draw the line in banning parties. --From publisher's description

Neighbors inhabit a distinct social sphere whose regulative ideal is the democracy of everyday life. Its chief elements are reciprocity and a practical disregard for the differences and inequalities that shape interactions in the broader society and in democratic politics. The democracy of everyday life has heightened significance during disasters. Neighbors hold our lives in their hands. But COVID-19 differs from physical disasters in ways that alter neighbor interactions. Contamination makes relations more fearful at the same time that isolation makes them more valuable. When the meaning attributed to the virus is not shared experience of disease and mortality but rabid partisanship, neighbor relations become distorted. This degradation of the democracy of everyday life signals that democracy itself is imperiled more deeply than political paralysis, corruption, and institutional failure suggest.

In Left Turn: How Liberal Bias Distorts The American Mind, Tim Groseclose argues that media effects play a crucial role in American politics. His case rests on three arguments: (1) that journalists tend overwhelmingly to be liberal rather than conservative; (2) that their innate political bias slants their views in empirically measurable ways; and (3) that this bias fundamentally shapes American politics, by bringing US citizens further to the left than they would naturally be. According to Groseclose, in a world where media bias did not exist, American citizens would on average hold views close to those of Ben Stein or Bill O'Reilly. In such a world, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama by a popular vote margin of 56%—42% in the 2008 presidential election.In making these claims, Groseclose draws on his own research, and on recent media scholarship by both political scientists and economists, making the broader claim that peer-reviewed social science—which seeks to deal with problems such as endogeneity and selection bias—should be the starting point for public arguments about the role of the media. His book, then, is clearly an effort to bring social scientific arguments into mainstream debates. Groseclose makes no secret of his conservative political leanings—but recent books from left-leaning political scientists such as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are equally unapologetic. It is at least plausible that political scientists' typical unwillingness to engage directly in political arguments has weakened the discipline's capacity for public engagement.In this symposium a diverse group of contributors have been invited to engage with Groseclose's arguments in ways that bring together specific empirical and/or theoretical points and arguments aimed at the broader "political science public sphere" that Perspectives on Politics seeks to nurture. Contributors were asked to consider these five questions: (1): How do we best measure media effects? (2): If media bias exists, what are its plausible sources? (3): Can one use work on media effects to determine what people's views would be in the absence of such bias? (4): Do you agree that American politics is insufficiently representative, and if so what do you consider the primary sources of this problem? (5): What kinds of political and/or media institutions or practices might enhance democratic discourse?—Henry Farrell, Associate Editor

One under-theorized aspect of "multiculturalism and the antidiscrimination principle" is religious and ethnicity based political parties. With political organization, the fact of pluralism is made concrete for democratic purposes. When the struggle for empowerment is "waged within the world of democratic politics" it is waged through parties. That is the associational form modern democracies have settled on for participation, representation, and governing, and for countervailing power and regular opposition. Particularist parties and bloc voting are key instruments of political conflict and, as important, of political integration. This Paper looks at the challenges these parties pose to democracy; specifically, at the principal reasons given for banning parties from participation in electoral politics. I identify four categories of justification for disqualification: violent overthrow, incitement to hate, altering the character of the nation, and outside support or control. This is a preliminary to setting out regulative principles of "defensive democracy."