Partisan Speech and Political Legitimacy
Matteo Bonotti · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017
This chapter asks whether partisans should enjoy greater freedom of speech than ordinary citizens, including freedom to use hate speech when the latter is (or should be) legally regulated. The chapter shows that partisan speech offers a threefold contribution to political legitimacy, by acting as a loudspeaker, helping to set the political agenda, and advancing broad manifestoes and programmes. This threefold contribution of partisan speech to political legitimacy offers a pro tanto justification for exempting partisans from hate speech laws. However, the chapter argues that a justification-based (as opposed to merely procedural) conception of political legitimacy would often justify hate speech legislation and, crucially, that the special commitment that partisans ought to display to public reason, as illustrated in the previous chapters, implies that partisan speech should not be granted any special protection or exemption from hate speech legislation, despite its threefold contribution to a procedural kind of political legitimacy.