What is partisanship in simple terms?

Think of Partisanship Like Rooting for a Football Team

One simple way to understand partisanship is to think about sports.

Imagine you have an uncle who watches every Green Bay Packers game. He's a lifelong Packers fan. When the Packers are great, he roots for them. When they're terrible, he still roots for them. They might make bad decisions. He might disagree with the coach. Another team might objectively be playing better football.

It doesn't matter. When Sunday comes around, he's wearing green and gold and rooting for the Packers.

Why?

Because they're his team.

Partisanship can work similarly in politics. A person identifies with a political party, supports its candidates, and wants that party to win elections and gain political power. The original meaning is fairly straightforward: being partisan means supporting, advocating for, or aligning with a particular political party or candidate.

Just as supporting a football team isn't inherently bad, neither is supporting a political party. Political parties give people a way to organize around shared goals, elect representatives, and influence government. Having different parties also gives voters competing choices about how government should operate.

When Your Political Party Becomes "Your Team"

The sports analogy becomes particularly useful when we consider why partisanship can become so powerful.

Political scientist Lilliana Mason explains that political affiliation can function as a social identity. Being a Democrat or Republican isn't necessarily just a collection of opinions about taxes, healthcare, immigration, or other policies. People can develop a psychological connection with others who share their political identity.

That means politics can start to feel personal.

If your party wins, we won.

If your party loses, we lost.

And because the United States primarily has two major political parties, elections often operate like a zero-sum competition. One side's victory necessarily means the other side's defeat. Mason argues that this structure can make political competition particularly antagonistic because each election becomes a competition between two opposing groups for political power and status.

When Partisanship Goes Too Far

The problem isn't simply having a team. It is what happens when your team winning becomes more important than everything else.

Return to our Packers fan.

Imagine that a referee makes a questionable call benefiting Green Bay. If the same call benefited the opposing team, your uncle would be furious. But because it helped the Packers, he suddenly thinks the referee made the right decision.

Or perhaps another team makes a smart play. Instead of admitting it was a good play, he dismisses it simply because he dislikes the other team.

Something similar can happen in politics. People may defend behavior from their own party that they would criticize if the opposing party did it. They may dismiss an idea because it came from the other side rather than evaluating the idea itself. In more extreme forms, political competition becomes less about advancing policies and more about making sure the other team loses.

This connects to what researchers call affective polarization: feeling increasingly positive toward your political group and increasingly negative toward the opposing group. Those feelings do not necessarily correspond to how far apart people actually are on policy. Sometimes, how much people dislike the opposing group can exceed their actual political disagreements.

So, What Does Partisanship Mean?

Partisanship simply means having a political team and supporting that team. A Democrat who consistently supports Democratic candidates is displaying partisanship, just as a Republican who consistently supports Republican candidates is.

That political loyalty isn't automatically harmful. Parties are an important way people organize and participate in democratic government.

The danger comes when politics becomes entirely about our team versus their team. When winning becomes more important than judging ideas fairly, compromising when necessary, or recognizing the legitimacy of political opponents, ordinary partisanship can become hyperpartisanship. Political opponents stop looking like people who happen to wear a different jersey and start looking like enemies.

Being a fan of your political team is one thing. Believing the other team shouldn't be allowed on the field is something very different.