Parties organize political conflict rather than merely reflecting preexisting disagreements

Evidence

Parties are essential to representative democracy in pragmatic ways: selecting candidates, forming majorities, organizing legislatures, and providing the glue across state and national politics. There is also a demonstrable relationship between partisanship and high levels of voter participation. But, beyond the pragmatic things that parties do for democracy, there is this fundamental thing: parties translate the pluralism of society into organized political conflict. They do the work of drawing politically relevant lines of division and shaping the system of conflict that orders democratic politics and decision-making. Parties are not simply reflections of disagreements and conflicts that exist independent of politics. Parties and partisans organize conflict in the process of creating coalitions. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 193

Categorization

• XREF: Counterintuitive to the commonsense view that parties mirror society’s divisions; resonates with Schattschneider on the organization of conflict. — connects to: Parties do not mirror existing conflicts but actively create and organize them — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 193; A party can function as a general ideology superintending scattered rival groups; Political issues only become contested once enough people attend to them — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 446 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that parties create rather than reflect conflict, yet this creation is what orders democracy, inverts how most people think about partisanship and is genuinely dense.

Broader Connections

• Parties do not mirror existing conflicts but actively create and organize them #corroborates (1.00) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 193
• Political issues only become contested once enough people attend to them #expands (0.72) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 446
• A party can function as a general ideology superintending scattered rival groups #expands (0.70)