The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (40 page)

A political culture characterized by (1) most citizens' acceptance of the authority of the state, but also (2) a general belief in participation in civic duties. The term was systematically deployed in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's influential 1963 book,
The Civic Culture
, and revived in their
The Civic Culture Revisited
(1980). Prompted by a concern about a perceived problem of political stability in Western democracies, the civic culture model suggested that a polity in which citizens were informed about political issues, and involved in the political process, could not of itself sustain a stable democratic government. The civic culture is seen as an allegiant political culture in which political participation is mixed with passivity, trust, and deference to authority. Traditionality and commitment to parochial values are seen as balancing involvement and rationality.
The Civic Culture
provided a five-nation study of citizen values and attitudes viewed as supportive of a democratic political system. In the mainstream of behavioural analysis when it was first published, the book has been somewhat eclipsed by the emphasis on policy analysis. Its concerns about the survival of democracy in Western societies now seem somewhat misplaced. The spread of higher levels of education through the population has encouraged new forms of participation in politics, such as
social movements
and campaigning
interest groups
.
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A body of ideas about politics which stresses the merits of a sturdy and independent way of life (often in an image of rural yeomen). Virtue consists in public-spiritedness, and a participatory orientation. Professional or standing armies, and a separate political class, are much disfavoured. There is an opposition to luxury, and to commercial self-interest and corruption.
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A political act involving disobeying governmental authority on grounds of moral objection. The term was first used by H. D. Thoreau in his essay
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
, 1849. The best-known practitioner of the doctrine is Mahatma
Gandhi
. Gandhi believed that the colonial authorities in India could be challenged most effectively by moral and spiritual force. By declaring the British denial of freedom to Indians a moral problem, Gandhi sought to mobilize mass opinion against colonialism. The refusal to obey the laws of the colonial rulers was to be an individual decision and the consequences of doing so understood as such. Civil disobedience was also a way of bringing together the fact of protest with the concept of
satyagrah
(an insistence of Truth) or non-violence. Individual non-violent protest then became the hallmark of the Indian national movement under Gandhi . Gandhi organized two notable civil disobedience protests: the first in 1930–1 which started with the salt
satyagrah
and the Dandi March to make salt from sea waters, and the second in 1942 which became better known as the Quit India Movement.
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Those freedoms which are, or should be, guaranteed to persons to protect an area of non-interference from others, particularly power holders and legal authorities. Civil liberties are especially invoked to limit the justifiable coercive power of the state: for example, freedom from arbitrary arrest, or detention, and
habeas corpus
;
freedom of speech
; freedom of lawful assembly; freedom of association and of movement; and the right not to incriminate oneself. Some civil liberties are seen as implications of respect for the rule of law; for example, the right to a fair trial. The importance of civil liberties has been reflected in attempts to provide constitutional guarantees for them.
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The political, social, and economic rights that each citizen has by virtue of simply being a citizen, and which are usually upheld by law. The meaning of the phrase is shaded by its commonest reference: to the civil rights of ethnic minorities in the United States. In this and similar usages, there is at least as much stress on the rights of a (minority) group as on the rights of the individual.
Nevertheless the phrase is older and more general than the American Civil War. Any state which gives constitutional or legal guarantees to its citizens confers civil rights. However, constitutions sometimes state rights without giving the citizen any means of enforcing them against the state. In the
French Revolution
for instance, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) was modelled on contemporary American attempts to guarantee certain individual freedoms, which appear in the US Constitution (1787) and its first ten amendments, collectively known as the
Bill of Rights
(1791). The French Declaration remains in force in that it was incorporated into the preamble to the constitutions of the
Fourth
and
Fifth Republics
. However, French practice, unlike American, gives the citizen no legal channel to claim some of the rights guaranteed in 1789.
Both the French and the American declarations guarantee the citizen freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, and also offer procedural guarantees of fair trials and fair taxation. But the American Bill of Rights is part of the Federal Constitution; therefore from 1787 to 1865 it protected citizens only from the federal authorities, not from states or other levels of government. Indeed the Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, specifies that ‘the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people’. Not until the end of the Civil War were any civil rights against the states guaranteed. Then, the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) outlawed slavery; the
Fourteenth
(1868) extended the rights guarantees in the original constitution and Bill of Rights to the states; and the Fifteenth (1870) forbade the United States or any state to restrict voting rights on the grounds of ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude’. It is the programme of these three amendments that has come to be particularly understood by the phrase ‘civil rights’ in the United States.
Despite the unambiguous language of the three ‘Reconstruction Amendments’, civil rights were not protected for almost a century longer. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, those who had supported the ‘rebellion’ in the Southern states were disenfranchised, and the state governments were run by ‘carpet-baggers’: politicians from the North who packed their belongings in capacious carpet-bags and went to run the Southern states, supported by black votes. Their enemies alleged that they put as much into their carpet-bags to take north with them again. A bargain was struck in 1876 whereby the Democrats were allowed to claim victory in the disputed presidential election of that year on condition that Northern troops were withdrawn from the South. That marked the end for the carpet-baggers, but also for Southern blacks. A succession of discriminatory laws and practices in Southern state laws were upheld by the courts, in spite of their apparently blatant inconsistency with the Reconstruction Amendments. In the key case of
Plessy
(1896), the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana segregation law on the grounds that segregation does not mark ‘the colored race with a badge of inferiority’ unless ‘the colored race chooses to put that construction on it’. The judgment in
Plessy v Ferguson
was not reversed until the ruling in
Brown v Board of Education of Topeka
(1954) that separate facilities were inherently unequal.
Brown and Baker v Carr
(1962, enforcing equal-sized electoral districts) were the most important of a series of Supreme Court judgments that restored civil rights in law to what a non-lawyer would believe the Reconstruction Amendments meant. These cases also helped to solidify the doctrine of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby extending its guarantees to the state and local levels.
But the Supreme Court commands no armies. Civil rights could not become effective until both the executive and the legislature had also put their weight behind them. The executive did so by sending federal forces to the South to enforce desegregation; the legislature did so by passing, especially, the Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act 1965. Voting rights have become self-enforcing: now that black citizens have the vote, politicians have to balance their votes against those of white supremacists. Voting rights are now safe, but not all civil rights are. In 1994 federal agencies were still trying unsuccessfully to settle black families in public housing in Vidor, Texas.
A difficult problem in civil rights is whether all minorities can, or should, receive equal protection. In 1978 a would-be student, Alan Bakke , complained that his Fourteenth Amendment rights had been violated because he had been refused a place whereas minority ethnic group students with poorer qualifications had gained places in the quota which had been set aside for them. In
Regents of the University of California v Bakke
(1978) a divided Supreme Court held that Bakke had been unlawfully excluded but that
affirmative action
to redress past racial discrimination was not unlawful. Affirmative action continues, notably in higher education. In California, for instance, black, Hispanic, and ‘native American’ (American Indian) applicants benefit from affirmative action, but Asian-Americans do not. Although equally a minority, they fill more than their proportionate share of places in higher education without affirmative action. But this raises the fear that affirmative action could be self-defeating as no minority group has an incentive to lose its underprivileged status.
In the United Kingdom, the currency of the term ‘civil rights’ is largely due to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which copied American methods in its protests against religious discrimination in the 1960s. Unlike their American counterparts, the Northern Ireland protesters had no constitutionally guaranteed rights, because nobody in the United Kingdom does. However, UK legislation now bans discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, or (in Northern Ireland only) religion. Thus citizens may enforce some rights against the state, an example being the embarrassment of the UK armed services in the 1990s at having to pay substantial sums in compensation to servicewomen who had been unlawfully dismissed on becoming pregnant. An alternative channel for civil rights has been to appeal to the
European Court of Human Rights
.