The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (77 page)

The administration of justice in accordance with established rules and principles. This cardinal principle of limited government of great antiquity is embedded in clause 39 of Magna Carta (1215). ‘No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way destroyed,…except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.’ Subsequently this right was extended to all subjects and ‘law of the land’ became synonymous with ‘due process of law’. It is this terminology that appears in key amendments to the United States Constitution. The
Fifth Amendment
(1791), one of those that comprise the so-called
Bill of Rights
, was designed to ensure that the federal government did not deprive citizens of their ‘life, liberty, or property, without due process of law’. Identical wording is to be found in the
Fourteenth Amendment
(1868) which provides Americans with similar protection against the governments of the states. This clause has played a dramatic part in the judicial activism of the
Supreme Court
since the 1950s, notably in
civil rights
cases.
DM 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1858–1917)
French sociologist. Durkheim dominated the French educational system at all levels between 1906 and 1917 when he held the chair of education (renamed the chair of sociology in 1913) at the Sorbonne. In
The Rules of Sociological Method
(1895), he attempted to establish sociology as a science with its own particular method, explaining a distinct reality separate from individuals, and restraining their behaviour. His most famous methodological proposition was that social facts must be considered as things. Throughout his career, Durkheim applied this view to the problem of social integration which he examined in all his principal works. In
The Division of Social Labour
(1893), he proposed a general theory to explain the evolution of societies from primitive, held together by mechanical solidarity (based on similarity between different individuals), to modern, held together by organic solidarity (based upon complementary differences between individuals). Unlike economists, whom he accused of tautology, Durkheim based this evolution towards greater division of labour on the social fact of increasing density of populations, which led to reduction in the level of mechanical solidarity, and therefore to consciousness of the change. Following their method, derived from philosophy, economists posited a deliberate choice of increased division of labour as the cause although it was also the effect. In
Suicide
(1897), less under the influence of
Comte
than previously, he tried to find sociological explanations for what is apparently the most isolated action possible. He divided suicide into three (or perhaps even four) main types, one of which is the most important for his analysis. This is based on his concept of anomie, the breakdown of the individual's connection with society. He rejected what he saw as simplistic positivist explanations, as for example the thesis that suicide can be explained by differences in climate at different seasons. Social facts can only be explained by other social facts, not determined from outside. He saw anomie as a result of the rapidity of industrialization which was breaking down the existing moral order. In his last important work,
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(1912), Durkheim again chose a particular problem to discover its general implications. He examined primitive Australian religion, and proposed that the general form of religion, repeated in all other examples, was as a system of collective beliefs separating sacred from profane. Whatever the particular forms asserted by different religions, the sacred was always society in general, the external force that imposed much of their behaviour on individuals. Durkheim attempted to turn morality into a science, and he always believed that sociology should be used to improve society rather than simply to explain it. The most important way in which this could be done was through education, a view he shared with the founders of the Third Republic. In a political sense, he was a liberal, but not of the strictly individualist kind such as
Bentham
. He examined socialism in 1893, and decided that while it was certainly a proper reaction to the evils of industrial society, its proposed solution would not improve human life. He was one of the chief proponents of the doctrine of solidarism which, as one of his followers asserted in 1907, became ‘a sort of official philosophy for the Third Republic’. This formed the ideological basis of the Radical Party which was founded in 1905 and became the most important in the Republic.
CS 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

In
Political Parties
(English edition 1954), the French political scientist Maurice Duverger proposed a law and a hypothesis about the relationship between the number of parties in a country and its electoral system. The law was that ‘the simple majority, single ballot system favours the two-party system’; the hypothesis was that ‘both the simple-majority system with second ballot and proportional representation favour multi-partism’. The division of these two statements into one law and one hypothesis is due to
Riker
, who claims that the first is a generalization which can be backed by formal reasoning, whereas the second is an easily falsifiable contingent generalization about the cases actually studied by Duverger . The law is driven by the idea that in the long-run rational politicians and voters will realize that it is hopeless to have more than two parties competing at national level. Although three parties may remain in contention for a few years, a party which begins to slide will rapidly disappear as everybody comes to realize that it will win no seats at all if its support is evenly dispersed. By contrast, the number of parties in a proportional electoral system may be determined more by social forces than by the system's opportunities to split without penalty: Austria and Germany are well-known examples of countries with PR but only three or four parties.
The reasoning behind Duverger's law seems good, so why has three-party competition been so hardy in Britain? The struggle between the Liberals and the Labour Party to be the opposition to the Conservatives ran from 1918 to 1929, when it was won by Labour, and reopened in 1981. Because the Liberals (now Liberal Democrats) have some local fortresses, they have never been entirely wiped out, so that votes for them are not always obviously wasted. The need to modify Duverger's law to allow for differing patterns of two-party competition in different regions was pointed out by Douglas Rae (
The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws
, 1967). The British party system may settle down into one marked by Conservative— Labour competition in the cities and the north, and Conservative-Liberal Democrat competition in the suburbs, the countryside, and the south. A similar pattern of competition between two locally strong parties, which might be different parties in different parts of the country, persisted in Canada for many years until the obliteration of the Progressive Conservatives in 1993. One view voiced by G. Tullock is that ‘Duverger's Law is true, but it may take 200 years to work itself out’.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

In the House of Commons, a motion put down by a back-bench MP nominally for discussion ‘at an early day’ but with no time fixed for it. As the parliamentary timetable is controlled by the leadership of the parties, Early Day Motions are almost never actually debated. They may be regarded as pure expressive gestures, as cheap talk in which an MP can strike attitudes at no cost, or as a serious basis for classifying MPs' ideologies.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search