Partisanship and Political Learning: Lessons from Training Politicians

Abstract

Competition among parties is a central feature of democratic politics, but extreme partisanship can undermine democratic practices and institutions. We report the results of a formative curricular intervention involving reflective discussions designed to avoid hyper-partisanship in a training program for anyone—including university students—with political aspirations. The opportunity was provided by an annual Institute for Future Legislators at the University of British Columbia. The program offered weekend boot camps, followed by a parliamentary simulation held in the chambers of the provincial legislature. Data were collected from questionnaires and facilitated reflective discussions. Thematic content analysis of transcriptions of these discussions showed that they enabled participants to gain detachment from their parties, even as their appreciation grew for the complex balancing acts that partisan politicians must continuously perform.

Keywords:

• Partisanship
• reflective discussions
• civic education
• democracy
• political learning

Acknowledgements

Presented as a symposium at the 45th Annual Association for Moral Education Conference, November 7–9, 2019, Seattle, Washington, USA. Thanks to Darcia Narvaez, Clare McGovern, Allen Sens and Mitchell Bosley for advice and comments on earlier drafts; to Richard Johnston and Andrew Owen for advice on questionnaires; to Ken Sharpe for assistance training facilitators; to Hailey Graham, Chuka Ejeckam, Megan Dias, John Beebe, and Andrea Reimer for work as facilitators; to Veronica Hurtado for research assistance, and Gabriel Cameron Bazo and Ana Grace Rans Kolakovic for volunteering.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data are available upon request of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Contact: [email protected]

Notes

1 Bennion and Laughlin (2018) reviewed over 50 articles dealing with civic education from this journal. None specifically focused on training politicians. Corporate leaders get training, as do may other professionals, but politicians do not (Browde 2011; Hartley 2011, 2014; Cameron 2018: 132–140).

2 This finding is similar to the results of Bernstein’s (2008) legislative simulations.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by the Vancouver Foundation (UNR15-0439) and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant [435-2018-0393]. Approval for this research was obtained from the UBC Behavioral Research Ethics Board [H18-00825].

Notes on contributors

Maxwell A. Cameron

Maxwell A. Cameron is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His research focuses on comparative democratization (especially in Latin America), constitutions, and ethics in politics and his publications include Strong Constitutions (2013) and Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom (2018), both with Oxford University Press.

Alessandra Ribeiro

Alessandra Ribeiro has completed a master’s degree in Educational Psychology at the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) and a Master of Science degree in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She started her collaboration with the Institute for Future Legislators in September 2018 as a Research Assistant.

Gerald Baier

Gerald Baier is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He the co-founder of the Institute for Future Legislators and has served as Academic Director since its inception. As Academic Director he is responsible for devising the various simulation scenarios and activities of the program. He is coauthor of The Canadian Regime: An Introduction to Parliamentary Government in Canada (University of Toronto Press) and Contested Federalism: Certainty and Ambiguity in the Canadian Federation (Oxford University Press).

Spencer McKay

Spencer McKay is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia. His research is primarily in democratic theory with a focus on various kinds of democratic innovation, such as referendums and deliberative mini-publics. His work has been published in the Journal of Public Deliberation, Representation, and the Swiss Political Science Review.

Rebecca Alegría Monnerat

Rebecca Alegría Monnerat is the Project Manager for the UBC’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI) in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA). She is responsible for the Center’s research projects, strategic partnerships and programs, including the Institute for Future Legislators. She manages the Center’s research projects on global challenges to democracy, participatory innovations, and the quality of democracy in the Americas. She coordinates the SPPGA’s Phil Lind Initiative speaker series, an initiative that invites prominent scholars, writers and intellectuals to UBC to engage on the some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Catherine Ann Cameron

Catherine Ann Cameron is Honorary Professor Emerita in Psychology at the University of British Columbia and Emerita Professor at the University of New Brunswick. Her research addresses cross-cultural questions concerning moral development of children and youth in Canada and China. She also collaboratively conducts cultural studies of thriving and resilience using the visual methodology, “A Day in the Life”, wherein participants in diverse locations around the globe are filmed in early childhood, in the transition to school, in adolescence and old age. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK, SEID in Italy, Juruá in Brazil and Benthams Science in USA have published the findings from this research.