Jonathan White's research while affiliated with The London School of Economics and Political Science and other places
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Publications (45)
Over the last decade especially, European authorities have successively invoked exceptional measures in the name of exceptional circumstances. This improvised mode of emergency response raises problems for EU legitimacy. After a brief analysis of the core patterns, the article examines the scope for reform. It considers the case for pre‐emptively s...
As political divisions become sharper in societies around the world, many see the conditions for democracy as undermined. This paper starts by examining the concept of ‘polarisation’, central to many of these diagnoses. Along with a series of analytical assumptions, anxieties about polarisation express a normative ideal – politics as moderation. We...
The making of modern authority centred on efforts to formalise and de-personalise power, and transnational orders such as the European Union have often been viewed as an extension of that project. As this paper argues, recent developments tell a different story. More than a decade of crisis politics has seen institutions subordinated to and reshape...
This article explores the relationship between ideology, the state and the transnational as it bears on European integration. Though typically studied in national contexts, ideologies and their clash have been Europe-wide since their emergence. As I argue, the European Union (EU) can be understood both as the continuation of these long-standing cro...
This chapter starts by presenting recall mechanisms as an instance of democratic partisanship that may usefully bridge the divide between representative and direct mechanisms of popular participation. It examines the specificities of mandatory reselection and deselection as they apply to intra-party democracy, and the prima facie merits they displa...
In an age of grand coalitions, and widespread dissatisfaction with them, it is clear that one of the major challenges for contemporary parties is to pursue power without sacrificing the principles by which they define themselves. This points to one of the most important yet neglected criteria by which to assess an electoral system: its capacity to...
Response to Aurelian Craiutu’s review of The Meaning of Partisanship - Volume 16 Issue 1 - Jonathan White, Lea Ypi
Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. By Aurelian Craiutu. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 304p. $49.95 cloth. - Volume 16 Issue 1 - Jonathan White, Lea Ypi
Over the past 10 years, the literature on the normative dimensions of partisanship and party politics has rapidly grown. Yet, however rich and diverse, this literature lacked so far a single text able to comprehensively map the contours of the existing debates and, at the same time, open up a range of future research avenues. Jonathan White and Lea...
Usually pictured in relations of opposition, political parties are sometimes inclined to make alliances. This article examines the ethical questions such arrangements give rise to. It considers first the formal characteristics of an alliance as a distinctive form of association, moving on to examine what reasons for alliance are good reasons. Intri...
The article examines how the contestation of policy in the European Union increasingly depends on a willingness to break rules. It develops an account of what a politics of disobedience in this context may look like, the kinds of political agent that can lead it, and the normative basis on which to distinguish it from illegitimate forms of extra-le...
That parties might successfully organize transnationally is an idea often met with scepticism. This chapter argues that while certain favourable conditions are indeed absent in this domain, this implies not that partisanship is impossible but that it is likely to be marked by certain traits. Specifically, it will tend to be episodic, socially diffu...
The problems raised by global warming are widely discussed in terms of their implications for future generations. Underlying this generational scheme, and buttressed by its use, are certain ideas of time and of the relationship between the present and future. This article seeks to illuminate and critically examine these ideas. After a brief survey...
The re-emergence of the party as a site of mobilisation invites a broader interpretation of partisanship. A party is not just a collective that aims to win political power, but one that does so as part of a principled, long-term project.
Contemporary political theory has made the question of the “people” a topic of sustained analysis. This article identifies two broad approaches taken—norm-based and contestation-based—and, noting some problems left outstanding, goes on to advance a complementary account centred on partisan practice. It suggests the definition of “the people” is clo...
Trends of falling membership and support spell a time of crisis for political parties, possibly of transformation. Dilemmas of principle arise: should partisans revise their normative commitments in whatever way garners new supporters, or would that be to sell their party’s soul? This article investigates this as a problem of intergenerational obli...
That parties might successfully organize transnationally is an idea often met with scepticism. This article argues that while certain favourable conditions are indeed absent in the transnational domain, this implies not that partisanship is impossible but that it is likely to be marked by certain traits. Specifically, it will tend to be episodic, s...
At the level of general principle, representative democracy is appealed to by the EU institutions and member states alike. Yet in today's Europe it risks being marginalised amidst the actions and rhetoric of emergency – a norm to be waived in a state of exception, leaving decisions of lasting consequence shielded from public debate. A German consti...
Often, and increasingly, social and political life is narrated using the concept of generation. This article looks at contemporary expressions of 'generationalism' in British public life. It identifies the salient themes which emerge, links these to the social and political contexts in which these ideas are produced, and examines the points where t...
The imagery of Left and Right has been a common way to conceive democratic politics in modern Europe, and commentators have suggested it be extended to the European Union. This article examines the normative implications and plausibility of European politics being cast in these terms. It focuses on the challenges of rendering political division rec...
The paper presents a distinctive approach to cross-border ties between Europeans. In place of the standard focus on identity or trust, it recommends the study of practices of social comparison, understood as how citizens evoke relevant others for the purpose of situating and evaluating their experiences. The first section offers a conceptual analys...
Political justification figures prominently in contemporary political theory, notably in models of deliberative democracy. This article articulates and defends the essential role of partisanship in this process. Four dimensions of justification are examined in detail: the constituency to which political justifications are offered, the circumstances...
This article lays out and defends the role of political parties in cultivating a democratic ethos among citizens. It argues that citizens' commitment to the democratic idea of self-rule requires positive conviction of the worth of collective political agency, and suggests that this conviction draws on three main sources, characterised as normative,...
Perceptions of the EU tend to be studied by examining responses to targeted opinion polls. This paper looks instead at how citizens draw Europe into a wider discussion of politics and political problems. Based on a series of group discussions with taxi-drivers in Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic, it examines the motifs speakers use to explai...
In all kinds of political action, citizens are confronted with the performances of other citizens. An important guide to political behaviour is therefore likely to be the assumptions people make concerning how others can be expected to behave. This article explores common sense ideas about other citizens as potential political participants, drawing...
I examine responses to norm indeterminacy in the transnational context, focusing on regional integration in post-War Europe. I argue that the development of the European Union has been facilitated by the use of a legitimizing device whereby policy decisions at a European level are cast as beyond the scope of reasonable political disagreement and th...
It has become common to highlight the desirability of a more ‘politicised’ European Union (EU) so as to counter the low visibility of its policymaking and the disaffection this may breed. Endorsing this view, the article argues existing contributions to the topic tend to give insufficient attention to the relationship between institutional settings...
This paper examines the political categories of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, in particular as they are evoked and instrumentalised by political actors in the democratic process. Drawing on some of the insights of positioning theory, it shows how ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are discursive resources deployed, contested and resisted in political exchange. The paper loo...
This piece outlines some of the findings of an exploratory research project into popular forms of
identification in the contemporary European context and their implications for projects of transnational integration such as the European Union. Drawing on a series of group interviews conducted
with taxi-drivers in Britain, Germany and the Czech Republi...
Significant attention has been given to the necessary conditions for a viable and legitimate European polity. Drawing on traditions in political philosophy, a central strand of this debate has concerned what must be common to a set of people such that they may be ruled through the same institutions, with various types of collective bond proposed as...
Citations
... The Conference was initiated in a situation in which the European Union had already been confronted for several years with increasing attempts by citizens to reclaim constituent power (Patberg 2020: Ch. 2). Especially the Eurozone crisis, and in the build-up to the CoFoE also the COVID-19 crisis, have led to the viewpersisting to this daythat the European Union is confronted with challenges that require reforms also at a constitutional level (Kreuder-Sonnen 2023;White 2023). Accordingly, Federico Fabbrini (2020: 413) argued, at a time when the exact form of the Conference was still in debate, that 'if the whole process is to be more than simply a talking shop, it must necessarily lead to some structural reforms of the EU constitutional settlement'. ...
... These include new social movements, non-profit web.2.0 organizations, various hybrid forms of political institutions (networked political parties) and multi-layered forms of networked public governance (Miroshnichenko, 2012). Informal networks based on interpersonal trust and non-institutional mechanisms of political decision-making have become permanent elements of governance not only in developing countries, but also in the world's most established democracies, including the structures of the European Union (White, 2021). Non-governmental non-institu- tionalised networks, such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which publishes information on the offshore accounts of the world's leading politicians and includes over 600 investigative journalists from over 117 countries, are becoming new influential actors in the world order. ...
... It opened the door to totalitarian forms of rule, such as Nazism and Soviet Communism, both of which are anathema to Christian politics (see CDU, 1945, p. 2;Chappel, 2018, p. 132). These were also the dangers that European integration should guard against; indeed, the 'EU was to be built in their counterimage' (White, 2020(White, , p. 1294. ...
... As we shall see, we should not be blind to the possibility of partisan instrumentalizations of the mechanism. If the main effect of the recall was to provide a tool for poor losers to contest elections result, the democratic gain would not be clear (Welp, 2016;White and Ypi, 2020). Frequent recalls might then lead to polarization and mutual hatred between opposing parties, provoking "spirals of ever more vitriolic recall campaigns" (Bowler, 2004, p. 207) and disincentivizing loyal opposition. ...
... The account of 'revolutionary partisanship' developed by White and Ypi (2016, ch. 8) engages with strategic and justificatory questions around such transformations, but as Bonotti has noted in a symposium on the book, leaves parties beached between their obligations to conform with the constraints of public reason, and their role in improving the justificatory basis of political rule (Bonotti et al., 2018). The role of parties in enabling the development and articulation of particular collective interests points towards the need for philosophical investigation of the kinds of obligations on parties (and on the state) that might be generated as a result. ...
Reference: Political parties and republican democracy
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... In this regard, the paper contributes to the empirical discussion on how parties in competitive authoritarian regimes fail (or succeed) to coalesce and maps the implications of such actions for electoral turnover, democratic consolidation, and governance (Bogaards 2014). Secondly, the core argument pursued in the paper is that it is complicated for opposition forces to cooperate within a transitional election owing to office-seeking motives that reign supreme (Oyugi 2006;White 2018). ...
... Further, nonviolence points to forms of collective action when there is a coup d'état (Sharp and Jenkins, 2003;Taylor, 2011), and even when subversive criminal organizations are in control of the territory (Beyerle, 2014). A fascinating and challenging question for EU theorists is how disobedience can find a place in EU governance (White, 2017). ...
Reference: What has Nonviolence got to do with the EU?
... This storyline is particularly influential in the context of climate change due to the temporal lag between causes and effects. Underpinned by a modern ontology of linear time (Staley, 2017), this storyline foregrounds tensions and differences between generations while backgrounding differences within generations (White, 2017). Casting the future as an inheritance, this storyline positions young people (overlapping with the category of childhood) as the economic and emotional investment of adults (Katz, 2018). ...
... In that sense, strengthening democracy "at home" can also be a way of contributing to justice and democracy on a global scale. 28 Political parties have recently received some degree of attention among political philosophers and theorists (e.g., White and Ypi 2016;Müller 2021). ...
... By formulating these hypotheses, we, first, contribute to the existing literature on people-making or, in the terms of White and Ypi (2017), on 'the politics of peoplehood'. At bottom, our argument addresses an empirical matter, and thus needs to be confirmed by empirical research. ...
