In the concluding chapter of my book on parties and ideologies, I call for normative political theory to engage more with political parties. It seemed natural to ask whether the ideologically distinct parties I had described were good or bad for democratic governance. That, in turn, requires a robust vision for what kinds of parties are themselves good or bad for that end.

Sadly, normative theory usually has little to say about parties, ideologically polarized or otherwise. If we believe E.E. Schattschneider’s claim that “modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties,” then political theory spends a great deal of time talking about something other than modern democracy (Party Government, 1942).

Russell Muirhead’s The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age is a welcome exception. Muirhead makes the case that citizens and politicians motivated by their partisanship need not be a threat to democracy. Rather than asking them to bridge their partisan differences, Muirhead acknowledges that they differ over something real. Good democracy should be bolstered by those partisan differences, rather than trying to circumvent them.

Muirhead’s normative argument is a very good match for my empirical argument. I argue that ideologies like liberalism and conservatism inherently evolve as political thinkers engage with political issues. They can and do evolve independently of party coalitions. But since party activists are the most likely to adapt ideological beliefs, party coalitions will tend to reflect them. Today, the liberal and conservative ideologies have each become the core philosophy of one of the two parties.

Central to this argument is a distinction between party and ideology. Ideologies are about ends, particularly policy ends. Parties are about means, at least insofar as they view winning elections as a means to the end of implementing policy.

The move to distinguish party from ideology is not one that Muirhead makes, but I think it is in the spirit of his argument. We are in a “polarized age” because parties are also ideological. Both pieces matter. The distinction highlights and perhaps clarifies two important contributions of Muirhead’s book.

First, the distinction helps to characterize the three kinds of partisans that Muirhead introduces early in the book: The power seeker, the moral purist and the zealot. The power seeker is someone who uses the party for their own career goals. They care not at all about ideology. The zealot cares too much. The moral purist cares about their ideology, but they also recognized limits.

This distinction is important, because the argument is not that any partisanship is good. It is rather that we need to cultivate the right kinds of partisanship.

The moral purist is meant to be more admirable, but the distinction between the purist and the zealot was not always clear to me. Muirhead writes “The political purist becomes a zealot when he comes to believe … that there is no justifiable impediment to bringing [his] righteousness to the world” (p. 48). But it is not always clear what kinds of impediments are justified.

In describing the zealot, Muirhead notes that modern ideology is no “fully worked out system of social thought” (p. 51). I also argue that ideology is the result of an always flawed and still-incomplete attempt to work out such a system, but we need to accept ideology as having such limitations. All ideologies are, especially to their detractors, potentially wrongheaded. But we have them. So merely being ideological cannot be the problem, exactly.

Separating ideology from party suggests to me a way of describing the right kind of partisan, which I will call the practical purist. The practical purist accepts one specific impediment to bringing righteousness to the world—the need to win. If you can’t get a majority to at least acquiesce to your goals, you need to temper your goals.

In other words, the practical purist values both their ideology as well as their party.

An ideological party must build a coalition that is sometimes, maybe even often, consistent with the ideology, but also which compromises to bring in new members. Ideologies themselves have schisms, which could lead ideologues to let internecine combat undermine partisan combat. Strategic ideologues, on the other hand, spend time trying to find common ground with their potential allies. This is the work done at The New Republic in especially the first half of the last century and at the National Review in especially the second half.

This idea is captured in what is my favorite line in Muirhead’s book: “Almost all partisanship is a compromise—not always with rival partisans, but always with our fellow partisans” (p. 18). Non-partisans who are unwilling to vote for a party because they don’t agree with it on every issue are exactly the sort who fail to understand that parties are coalitions.

Ted Kennedy, whom Muirhead praises as “a partisan, in the best sense” is praiseworthy precisely because he both “knew how to get power and keep it,” but was also “principled, and no one was ever in doubt that liberalism oriented everything Kennedy thought” (53).

If the best partisans balance ideology and party, then the modern age is a good one to be in. In the 1960s, scholars (e.g. Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, Presidental Elections: Strategies and Structures of American Politics, 1968) described the contrast between purists and pragmatists among party activists. In recent decades, it is not merely that purists are on the rise, but that more and more activists appear to be both.

When parties do not have an ideology at their core, they are built on patronage or temporary logrolls. They can too easily be just about power. And when ideologies are not tempered by partisan practicality, they lead to zealotry. What we want, then, are ideologically oriented parties.

The second area in which the distinction between ideology and party helps is in thinking about institutional design. Both Muirhead’s book and mine often take institutions as given, but we might explore how to bend them to better accommodate parties, especially ideological ones.

Muirhead’s discussions of institutions tend to compare non-partisan forms with partisan forms, finding the non-partisan forms lacking. For example, with nominations, he compares the non-partisan candidate selection with primaries and caucuses for partisan candidacies. But among partisan forms, there is a great deal of variation. If we want to best harness partisanship, we need better institutions.

Completely off the table, today, is the option of no primaries at all. But what sort of partisan primaries should we have? Should we have caucuses? Should a party be able to restrict participation in a primary to those who have shown loyalty to it? My own sense is that we want institutions that foster a vigorous debate within the party, but that are not necessarily susceptible to capture by a small but committed faction. But a party that is invulnerable to change from within is just as problematic.

In The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (2008), my coauthors and I showed that party leaders have been, with several important exceptions, largely successful in shepherding through their preferred candidate, which in most cases were pragmatic purists who were broadly acceptable to the party.

But the institutions party leaders are using are not the best tools for those goals, perhaps explaining why party leaders sometimes fail.

We want the nomination process to balance policy goals with electability. In a world of ideologically defined parties, we want to balance the purity of ideology with the practicality of party. The 2016 presidential nomination process in both parties has invoked the tension between zealotry vs. power seeking.

It is not clear to me that primaries, especially sequential primaries with a multicandidate field, are remotely good at helping parties find moral purists or pragmatic purists.

After 2016, I think we can expect both parties to at least talk about how they should improve their nominations processes. I fear that both will end up focusing too much on how to make the system “more democratic,” rather than making more suited to serve party democracy. Perhaps party leaders should read The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age before they get started.