The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (235 page)

Legal or moral recognition of choices or interests to which particular weight is attached. Assertions that X has a legal right to Y are tested by whether the law does in fact recognize X's right to Y; assertions of a right in the absence of that legal recognition may be demands that the law be changed to accommodate the asserted right, or be a way of stating the perceived demands of morality. There are two principal theories seeking to explain what it is to have rights and the purpose of ascribing them to individuals. On the first view, a person who possesses a right has a privileged choice: it is recognized, if a legal right, because the law will ensure that it has effect, while if a moral right it identifies a person whose choice should have effect. To the extent that other persons have duties or liabilities as a consequence of the right, it is the right-holder who may choose to release them from those duties or choose not to trigger their liabilities. The point of rights, then, is to make available these sorts of choices, and a system of rights involves some sort of distribution of freedom. On the alternative view, rights give expression to important interests, and it is the purpose of rights to protect a person's significant interests by imposing duties on others. (Whether only persons are capable of having rights is a debated issue, but one affected by whether the capacity for choice or the possession of interests is thought fundamental.) Which choices or interests have the relevant importance or significance still needs to be specified, of course: for some writers the interests are those which would be threatened by
utilitarian
calculations. One recurrent controversy about rights is just how weighty they should be. Are rights ways of establishing important claims, but claims which are defeasible or alienable? Or are rights vetoes (‘trumps’, according to Dworkin ) which cannot be put into a balance? ( See also
side-constraint
.) On the one hand, to respect a property right when the lives of thousands could be saved by overriding it looks fetishistic; on the other, to allow rights to be overruled by considerations of general utility is alleged to neglect the integrity and separateness of persons. In any case, if and when rights conflict we shall have to decide which to uphold, possibly on utilitarian grounds.
Two problems about freedom have parallels in the discussion of rights. The first concerns the distinction between a formal right to X and the substantive capacity to X. For example, A has a legal right to X, in a case where that means ‘A is not to be forbidden to do X’, does not guarantee that the action X is available to A, since its performance may require resources which A lacks. Similarly, with respect to
equality
,
Marx
criticized the rights held dear by the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century: to guarantee to all a right of private property (for example) does not by itself give everyone equal amounts of property, or, indeed, any property at all. An equality of rights, in short, is compatible with great inequality in actual conditions. The second parallel with debates about freedom arises from the alleged differences between rights the primary purpose of which is to protect the individual from outside interference, and rights attributed to the individual which impose duties on others to provide the individual with resources. It is suggested that the latter (welfare rights) are unwarranted extensions of the former (claim rights) because of the different sort of duty they require. The alleged differences depend in part on whether we focus on choice/freedom or interests as explanations for the ascription of rights.
The relationships between rights and duties within systems of positive law cannot be assimilated to one model. Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld demonstrated over seventy years ago that ‘rights’ embrace four types of legal relation, and his analysis can also be applied to non-legal usage. Very often, statements about rights draw on more than one of the four relations identified. (1) A right is a liberty: a person has a liberty to X means that he has no obligation not to X. (2) A right is a right ‘strictly speaking’ or a claim right: a person has a right to X means others have a duty to him in respect of X. (3) A right is a power, that is, the capacity to change legal relations (and others are liable to have their position altered). (4) A right is an immunity, that is the absence of the liability to have the legal position altered. The relation between the right-holder and other persons differs in the four cases. The importance of Hohfeld's analysis is not merely that it clarifies rights talk. Understanding how rights operate, characterizing them accurately, is a necessary precondition to decisions about their value. Sceptics have been critical of the importance rights seem to attach to the individual, particularly the acquisitive or egoistic individual: they see rights as the expression of the distance between a person and the community. Supporters have argued that rights are of crucial value in balancing the claims of persons, and that they have a potential to integrate society by providing a framework for action.
AR 

 
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(1921–93)
American political scientist, and pioneer of the
rational choice
study of
Federalism
, coalition theory, and
structure-induced equilibrium
. His most important work,
Liberalism against Populism
(1982), ranges widely through normative political theory and American political history. He argues that the probability of cycling in a large society, which means that there will be no platform of policies that would not lose a majority vote to some other, renders the idea that the ‘people should rule’, associated with
Rousseau
and his followers, vacuous. He interprets the stability of American political history since 1865 to the institutions which hide cycling from view, and interprets the Civil War, and the presidential election of 1860 which immediately preceded it, to disequilibrium exploited by the previous losers, who formed the
Republican Party
on the basis of a new coalition of forces to win in 1860.

 
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Generally, the chance or hazard of some unpleasant outcome. To be carefully distinguished from uncertainty. The distinction usually made is that a risky event is one where the odds can (at least in principle) be calculated; an uncertain event is one where they cannot (e.g. in a game with no dominant strategy, such as the
prisoners' dilemma
supergame
). Perceptions of risk are important in politics. There is massive evidence that people make systematic errors in their perceptions of risk: especially by believing that rare but newsworthy events are commoner than they are. As misleading perceptions of risk feed through to political attitudes and therefore to political decisions, politicians avoid some relatively safe actions, such as disposing of nuclear waste, and encourage some extremely risky ones, such as driving cars.

 
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(1758–94)
French Revolutionary politician; one of the architects of the ‘Reign of Terror’ (1793–4) which claimed his own life. His deification of ‘the people’ using slogans loosely connected with
Rousseau
has led writers of the left to hail him as a precursor of socialism, and communism, and writers (mostly but not entirely) of the right to hail him as a precursor of totalitarianism.

 
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