Introduction: parties, partisanship and political theory

As E. E. Schattschneider once remarked, political parties are ‘the orphans of political philosophy’ (Schattschneider 1942, p. 10). It is surprising that despite the growing number of scholars dealing with the normative dimensions of partisanship, some of whom have contributed to this volume, parties still remain somehow at the margins of contemporary political philosophy. Is this a problem? And why should political philosophers and theorists care about parties? This special issue aims to provide some preliminary answers to this question.