The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (204 page)

 
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Literally, a belief in more than one entity or a tendency to be, hold, or do more than one thing. This literal meaning is common to all the political and social applications of the word, but it has applied in contexts so varied that the uses seem like separate meanings. The most established of these is pluralism as the tendency of people to hold more than one job or benefice, most specifically in the context of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church. In the late nineteenth century, pluralism was applied to philosophical theories or systems of thought which recognized more than one ultimate principle, as opposed to those which were ‘monist’. At the same time, the word came to be applied in the United States to the view that the country could legitimately continue to be formed of distinct ethnic groups, the Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, and so on, rather than that all differences should dissolve into a ‘melting-pot’.
All of these uses have had at least a slight influence on the primary contemporary meaning in which the pluralist model of society is one in which the existence of groups is the political essence of society. Pluralists in this sense contrast with élitists because they see the membership of village and neighbourhood communities, trades unions, voluntary societies, churches, and similar organizations as being more important than distinctions between a ruling class and a class that is ruled: vertical distinctions in society are more important than horizontal.
The forerunner of this kind of pluralism was F. R. de Lammenais who edited the journal
L'Avenir
in France in the early nineteenth century. Lammenais attacked both the individualism and the universalism of the
Enlightenment
and the Revolution. The individual, he said, was ‘a mere shadow’, who could not be said to exist at all socially except in so far as he was part of one or more groups. Both Lammenais and modern pluralists, including such notable American writers as Robert Dahl and Nelson Polsby , tend to believe both that society consists essentially of groups, with its political life a competition for group influence, and that this state of affairs is a good thing. Thus pluralism is often a relatively conservative doctrine, at least in relation to Marxism or radical democratic theory, which both tend to portray society as a predominance of an élite over a non-élite rather than a competition between groups.
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In a multicandidate election in which no candidate has obtained as much as half of the vote, the largest single total of votes for any candidate. A plurality (or
first-past-the-post
) electoral system is one which selects such a candidate as the winner.

 
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In the United States, before a bill which has passed the House and the Senate becomes a law it must be signed by the President. If he declines to sign a particular bill it automatically becomes law after ten congressional working days. However, if Congress adjourns before the required ten days have elapsed the bill is deemed not to have passed. The President has, in a sense, placed the bill in his pocket—thus a pocket veto.
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Policing is the activity of enforcing the criminal law and it has taken place in any society which can be said to have such a law. But in most societies the people doing the policing have also had other functions; typically they have been the military, church officials, citizens taking their turn, or persons hired by the magistrates. With the arguable exception of the Roman Empire, the existence of ‘the police’, a separate force designed entirely for enforcing the criminal law, is a product of modern urban society. The establishment of a metropolitan police force in London in 1829 is usually seen as the single most important event in this development. Police forces covered all of the United Kingdom by 1860 and many other states had imitated the development.
The existence of a police force, by its very nature, raises several related political issues. The oldest is summed up by the Latin question, ‘
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
?’ (Who guards the guardians?) That is, given the capacities and force of arms which the police must have to do their job, to whom are they accountable and how can they be prevented from abusing their position? Two related questions concern how the extent of police activity is to be defined and limited and the level of government at which responsibility for policing is treated. Subsidiary issues arise about how many police forces there should be and what should be the relations between them.
Accountability to local government suggests that the police will be responsive to local feelings and have good relations with the local community. But it might also imply that the police enforce local prejudices and are easily corrupted. The British (though not at any time the Irish) solution is to have local police forces which are heavily regulated and partly funded by the central government. A more common solution is to have more than one police force with different crimes dealt with at different levels; typically, the more serious crime is the concern of the larger territorial unit. In an extreme case a crime in the United States might be contested by the jurisdiction of six different forces, including the sole police force for the US as a whole, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI deals with crimes of an interstate nature or those beyond the capacity of more local forces; necessarily, its job must be, to some extent, to police the police.
A limitless police suggests a ‘police state’, which is a translation of the German
Polizeistaat
, a condition in which the authority and power of the police have become so great that they are the most feared entity of the state and effectively uncontrollable. This is most likely to happen when the police acquire a paramilitary role in dealing with disorder or a ‘secret’ police role in coercing and spying on those who are thought to be enemies of the state. Russia, particularly, has a long history of police forces with these powers, ranging from the Tsarist
Okhrana
to the Leninist
Cheka
to the
KGB
whose staff level at its height was approximately one million. The paramilitary role in many countries has been devolved to separate forces, the
Compagnie Republicaine de Securité
(CRS) in France, the
Guardia Civil
in Spain, and the state national guard forces in the United States. Of these, the first two are regarded as police forces while the latter is not.
The largest single reason for the situation in the United States is the concept of ‘police power’, of a clearly defined limit on the sort of things that can be policed. Constitutionally, this is limited to the ‘health, safety, morals, and general welfare’ of the population. Although, in principle, these criteria might seem to suggest no real limit, the courts have actually used them to limit the criminal law. In other English-speaking countries the idea of the limits of police power is less well honed in the courts, but is informally applied.
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