Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

All these political movements thrived on the elaboration of ideology that served not only to legitimate state power, but to obscure the enormous discrepancy between the democratic, egalitarian ideals and the oppressive, exploitative reality. What the priesthood had been to religiously based PC, the intelligentsia and the bureaucracy became to secular PC. The actual term ‘‘political correctness’’ began to be used principally in the Marxist tradition, which claimed the ability to perform scientific analysis of social and political events, and thus allowed for the possibility of being correct or incorrect in one’s analysis. The ‘‘party line,’’ as defined by the ruling elite in communist regimes, invariably claimed correctness, of course, and invented elaborate ex post facto rationalizations for even the most radical policy changes (e.g., the 1939–1941 Soviet-Nazi alliance to gobble up Poland). Soon, however, the concept of PC was adopted by opponents of Marxism to ridicule the dogmatism and obvious opportunism of communist regimes, as, for instance, in George Orwell’s brilliant satire Animal Farm.

More recently, in the 1990s, the term PC was revived in the English-speaking world, and rapidly gained currency as a description of the self-im- posed ideological conformity and censorship practiced by intellectual, business, and governmental elites in the United States, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere. While the term is principally a weapon used by conservatives to ridicule liberals, it is used across the ideological spectrum, sometimes in healthy, self-deprecatory criticism of fellow liberals or radicals.

CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL

CORRECTNESS

In the current context, PC has several interesting features, as follows:

1.While PC is often supported by state regulations, legislation, and a wide range of legal and extralegal measures (covering such things as ‘‘hate speech,’’ sexual harassment, homosexuality, and affirmative action), its principal focus of conformity enforcement is situated in

the intellectual, bureaucratic, and business elites that ‘‘voluntarily’’ adhere to the PC

ideology, exercise extensive self-censor- ship, and practice more or less subtle forms of ostracism against mavericks.

2.PC ideology is widely at variance with what the majority of the population regards as commonsensical, and it conflicts with the interests and beliefs of many large groups (e.g. males, whites, religious fundamentalists, the poorly educated). It thus pits the liberal ruling elites against the populist masses. The colleges and universities, especially the elite institutions among them, are the most vocal and articulate proponents of PC, as are, of course, the graduates of such institutions when they accede to the command posts of government and business.

3.PC is not a coherent political movement aimed at changing the fundamental structure of society, as were Marxism and fascism, for example. Rather, it is

an inchoate cultural movement aimed at imposing on a supposedly benighted

populous the values, lifestyles, and speech patterns of the elites. It attacks almost exclusively the symbolic aspects of popular culture, rather than the fundamental features of social inequality and injustice. One of its principal cultural products is a rich crop of rapidly changing euphemistic neologisms, the use or nonuse of which serves as evidence of whether one is

PC or not.

The central tenets of this elite PC ideology in the United States include the elements discussed below.

1.PC is a theoretical celebration of ‘‘diversity’’ on many fronts: religious, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and sexual. The corollary of this celebration of diversity is the rejection of the older ideology of the melting pot, of cultural assimilation, of English-language dominance, and an alternative vision of American society as a mosaic of racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and ‘‘lifestyle’’ groups clamoring for recognition of special status, and competing for scarce resources.

This diversity tenet has led in practice not so much to tolerance of ‘‘otherness,’’ a

widely accepted value, but to institutionalized, officialized recognition of group affiliation, rights and quota in employment, education, contracts, and so on. These ‘‘affirmative action’’ programs have often been ‘‘voluntary’’ and flexible, but they have faced massive resentment because they violated many values held dear by masses of Americans. They flew in the face of the principle that individuals have legal rights, not groups, and that these rights are equal. They also squarely violated universalistic norms, such as that merit, competence, or seniority should govern allocation of resources, rather than ethnic or racial membership. A massive backlash against affirmative action, bilingual education, and other ‘‘special group rights’’ programs resulted, because PC is seen, not only as creating division and dissension in American society, but as imposing a double standard of tolerance. For instance, black students are allowed to autosegregate on campuses in a way that white students are not. Hate speech codes are also asymmetrically enforced for blacks and whites, men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals. Indeed, the very same ‘‘hate’’ words, such as ‘‘queer’’ and ‘‘nigger,’’ are differently evaluated depending on who uses them!

2.PC embraces a libertarian ideology holding that individual freedom is, in principle, only limited by respect for the rights of others. Again, if PC libertarianism were evenhandedly applied, it would meet little opposition. This, however, is not the case. Take two examples: drug use and hate speech. The PC position on drug use is one of unequivocal condemnation of tobacco use (increasingly a lower-class habit), even those forms of it that do not pollute the air (such as chewing tobacco). Alcohol use, on the other hand, is widely tolerated, even though its lethality is second only to that of tobacco. As for the illegal drugs, there is no clear PC line, although many self-styled libertarians are amazingly tolerant of heavy state repression and suspension of civil rights involved in the ‘‘war against drugs.’’

Attempts to control hate speech on campuses and elsewhere is another glaring example of PC double standards. First, many PC proponents have little trouble reconciling their self-styled libertarianism and defense of free speech with attempts to restrict the latter for those with whom they disagree. Second, there is blatant lack of evenhandedness in ostracizing certain kinds of hate speech but not others. Thus, college professors may with impunity refer to their opponents as ‘‘male chauvinist pigs,’’ ‘‘racist honkies,’’ or ‘‘fascist cops,’’ but not as ‘‘dumb broads,’’ ‘‘ignorant niggers,’’ or ‘‘flaming faggots.’’ ‘‘Afrocentrist’’ teachers are allowed to spread anti-Semitic venom by alleging that African slavery was dominated by Jews, but psychometricians and psychologists like Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, and Richard Herrnstein are virulently attacked for suggesting that part of the persistent difference in performance of whites and blacks on intelligence quotient (IQ) and other standardized tests may be genetic in origin. Examples of this double standard of PC enforcement in academia are legion, as documented in Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education.

The offence, it seems, lies as much in the gender, skin pigmentation, or sexual preference of the offender as in the hate speech itself. Only certain combinations are taboo. Others are tolerated, or even found amusing. (Stand-up comedy is an excellent barometer of PC, for instance, and most stand-up comics are acutely attuned to PC. Women may, with impunity, insult men; gays may insult straights; and blacks may insult whites—but not vice versa.)

3.PC embraces conservationist, environmentalist causes; these, again, would receive wider acceptance if PC were not so elitist, se-

lective, and sentimentalist. PC ecologism is usually cast as a morality play be-

tween good guys (Native Americans, Aborigines, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club) and bad guys (loggers, oil companies, maquiladoras). The reality, of course, is much more nuanced. Native peoples, for

example, began to show as great a proclivity to overfish, overhunt, overgraze, overlog, and otherwise degrade their environment as that of more ‘‘advanced’’ peoples, as soon as they gained access to the destructive technology (steel axes, nylon nets, firearms, chain saws) that make these activities possible. There is also now a powerful backlash against ecologism among Third World intellectuals who argue, rather persuasively, that the ecological movement in the West is highly elitist. The ‘‘Green’’ movement is spearheaded, they say, by leisured romantics, intellectuals, biologists, and other educated members of affluent societies who, after despoiling their own countries, want to convince the poor countries to stop development in order to preserve unspoiled playgrounds for the scientists and eco-tourists of the rich countries.

4.PC shows a concern for equality, which, once more, would be widely shared in the general population, if it had not been extended by PC proponents in two radically new directions. The first extension concerns the transformation of the notion of individual equality of opportunity into group equality of results. The latter is as controversial as the former is almost universally accepted. The PC model of the ideal society is no longer one in which social rewards are fairly distributed to individuals according to their abilities, efforts, and ethics, but one in which socially defined racial and ethnic groups achieve proportional representation in every sphere of activity. Such a model of a quota society is not only absurd and unrealizable; it is also a prescription

for perpetual conflict. The definition of groups is arbitrary and manipulable for gain. Millions of people are of mixed descent, a disallowed category in contemporary America. The population base for establishing proportionality is elastic. (For instance, should blacks be 2 percent of the students at the University of Washington, their percentage in the population of the State of Washington, which it serves, or 12 percent, the percentage of blacks in

the United States?) Why should some

groups (e.g., Hispanics) be represented, but not others (e.g., Arabs)? Why is an overrepresentation of whites among physics professors objectionable, but not an overrepresentation of blacks on basketball teams, or of Hassidic Jews in the diamond trade? Why do PC liberals, who proclaim that race does not matter, defend, in the same breath, race-based affirmative action? (Even a formerly sensible Nathan Glazer reversed himself recently on this score and now believes in the necessity for a proportional black presence at elite universities. If blacks, why not poor rural whites, surely another oppressed minority?) In short, the quota society is a bad idea that deserves a quick burial. South Africa just abolished racial apartheid. Why should the United States perpetuate it?

The second controversial extension of the concept of equality by the PC proponents is on the gender front. Few Americans would contest the ideas that women’s worth is equal to that of men, that women should have equal rights with men, that they should be able to compete with men on equal terms, and that they should receive equal pay and benefits for equal work. But the PC agenda goes well beyond that consensual definition of gender equality. PC feminists are generally quite ambivalent about accepting the obvious differences between men and women; if they do accept these differences, they generally ascribe them more to nurture than to nature, and they seek either to ignore or to minimize them; and, quite inconsistently, they want to preserve gender segregation where it favors women (e.g., in sports). PC feminists, in short, want a unisex society, except where it suits them. Finally, PC feminists want the right to be protected against ‘‘sexual harassment’’ whenever they feel they have been harassed. Many, in addition, would want to subject sexual relations to a code of conduct involving repeated, explicit verbal assent (unilaterally imposed on men) for every sexual act. Some colleges have gone as far as institutionalizing this nonsense.

Needless to say, the common sense of most Americans, women as well as men,

refuses to accept an ideology that flies in the face of experience, and there is a substantial backlash against radical feminism. Yet PC feminist dogma still rules supreme in many policy domains—for instance, in the military, which tries not only to achieve full gender integration but to rule sex out of existence in its ranks. Any officer bold enough to suggest that this is impossible immediately jeopardizes his or her career.

5.PC takes a secular outlook that has its roots in eighteenth-century Enlightenment and has dominated Western intellectual life ever since, but that arouses deep antagonism in the half or more of the American population that considers itself religious, and, even more so, in the quarter or so who are fundamentalist Christians. PC secularism is more than Jeffersonian separation of church and state in that it also frontally attacks the ‘‘religious right’’ on moral issues such as contraception, divorce, and marriage, as well as most controversially—abortion and homosexuality. PC secularism is also at variance with its classical Enlightenment expression in that it does not automatically align itself with the scientific mainstream. For example, many PC secularists reject the mounting evidence supporting the partially genetic underpinning

of human behavior, of gender differences, and of basic abilities and character traits. While they may ridicule biblical creationism, they espouse an extreme ‘‘social constructionist’’ view of human behavior and human relations, which is, in fact, a form of secular creationism.

THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL

CORRECTNESS

Because the current form of American PC is such an elite phenomenon, its effect has been limited to the relatively small class of literate bureaucrats and academics who take it seriously. It did stifle intellectual discourse on American campuses and did promote the teaching of a good deal of nonsense masquerading as scholarship. But there is little evidence that it makes many converts, and considerable evidence that it brings out a conservative

backlash. Indeed, PC ideology already seems on the defensive, vulnerable as it is to ridicule. American cultural products always have some resonance in other countries, especially English-speaking and Western European ones: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Germany in particular. But in those countries as well, its influence has been limited to the intellectual elite. In much of the rest of the world, American-style PC has had even less resonance, either because the issues it addresses have little relevance there (e.g., race relations), or because other political and economic problems (such as human rights violations or poverty) give such issues as feminism or conservation much lower priority. Indeed, many PC tenets may even clash more openly with the values of non-Western cultures than they do with the common sense of Westerners.

The probability is, thus, high that the current wave of American-style PC has already crested and that it will be ephemeral. But then, a new brand will crop up, probably no more sane than the current one. Intellectuals, alas, often prove themselves to be much more the sycophants of power than the guardians of reason.

REFERENCES

Devine, Philip E. 1996 Human Diversity and the Culture Wars. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

D’Souza, Dinesh 1992 Illiberal Education. New York:

Vintage.

Fish, Stanley Eugene 1995 Professional Correctness. New

York: Claredon.

Friedman, Marilyn, and Jan Narveson 1995 Political

Correctness: For and Against. Lanham, Md.: Rowman

and Littlefield.

Glazer, Nathan 1975 Affirmative Discrimination. New

York: Basic.

Orwell, George 1946 Animal Farm. New York: Harcourt.

Wilson, John K. 1995 Myth of Political Correctness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

PIERRE L. VAN DEN BERGHE

POLITICAL CRIME

Political crime has been more often an object of partisan assertion than of independent research.

Passions are easily aroused, facts are difficult to establish. Nevertheless, a growing number of studies have contributed to (1) articulating the issues in defining political criminality, (2) describing instances and patterns of resistance to political-legal authority, (3) cataloging and analyzing governmental efforts to prevent and counter such challenges, and (4) proposing research agendas.

THE PROBLEM OF DEFINITION

Political criminality may be narrowly or broadly defined, with greater or lesser regard for definitions offered by laws and interpretations by authorities. Moreover, the values and politics of observers frequently influence their conceptions of what and who is politically criminal. The resulting mélange of definitions has led Kittrie and Wedlock to conclude pessimistically, ‘‘It may be that an objective and neutral definition of political crime is impossible, because the term seems to involve relativistic relationships between the motives and acts of individuals and the perspectives of government toward their conduct and allegiances’’ (1998, p. xxxvi). However, an alternative view is implicit in their understanding of political criminality as perceptual and relational, defined in interaction between opposing parties.

Whose perceptions decide what is to be called political crime? Apart from partisan and subjective answers, the empirical reality of political criminality is that it is defined by those with enough power to impose their perceptions. Insofar as a political authority structure has been established, one may argue that the dominant parties within it by definition have the power to define criminality (Turk 1982a, pp. 11–68, 1984; pp. 119–121; for more restrictive legalistic definitions, see Ingraham 1979, pp. 13, 19; Frank Hagan 1997, p. 2). However, this view leaves unsettled the question of how authorities themselves may be defined as political criminals.

The most common resolution is to expand the definition to include anyone who commits extralegal acts defending or attacking an authority structure. For example, Roebuck and Weeber consider political crime to be any illegal or disapproved act committed by ‘‘government or capitalistic agents’’ or by ‘‘the people against the government’’ (1978, pp. 16–17). This very subjective definition (disapproved by whom?) leaves one unable to distinguish either between acts against and on behalf of

authority or between legal and nonlegal behavior. A more promising approach is to recognize that criminality may be defined at different levels of political organization—international as well as national.

International conventions, treaties, and judicial decisions have gone far toward formally defining war crimes, genocide, terrorism, violations of human rights, and environmental depredations. Such international standards may be invoked as criteria for labeling not only individuals but also agencies and regimes as political criminals guilty of ‘‘state crimes’’ (Barak 1991; Ross 1995). Even when formal legal criteria have not been articulated, evidence of harmful consequences of governmental policies and corporate practices may be used to define as political crimes ‘‘acts of commission and omission that result in grave social harm’’ (Tunnell 1993, p. xiv).

Formal pronouncements and unofficial assertions, however, may not have much significance. Accusations against governmental and corporate regimes are unlikely to impact on them unless there is a significant likelihood that they will be penalized for their actions. Within nations, acts by subnational authorities have sometimes been effectively treated as political crimes by national authorities who saw them as endangering societal or elite interests. An example is the American federal government’s historic crackdown on state and local violations of constitutionally guaranteed civil rights in the South.

At the international level, it is still rare for even gross violations of human rights to result in sanctioning. Though often accompanied by rhetorical accusations of criminality, expeditions such as the Kosovo intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have typically been launched more out of geopolitical concerns than legal or moral ones, and tend to end in new political and economic accommodations rather than criminal trials. For the present, the lack or weakness of international policing and judicial institutions leaves powerful nations such as the United States free to reject or ignore such charges as practicing genocidal policies toward Native Americans, holding political prisoners, torturing detainees and convicts, and illegally authorizing operations in other countries by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement

Agency (DEA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). With little or no chance of their enforcement, invoking international or national laws to define political crimes will continue to amount to little more than largely subjective and partisan ideological tactics.

Another question is whether political criminality is to be defined only as behavior. While one may agree that only specified harmful acts should be punishable, the historical fact is that, in addition to offending behavior, nonbehavioral attributes such as ethncity and class background have frequently been used by antagonists as criteria of intolerable political deviance. Moreover, imputed as well as observed deviations or threats have been used. Anticipation as well as reaction are involved in the identification of political criminality. At the beginning of World War II, Japanese immigrants and their descendants in the United States were officially defined as security risks and forcibly relocated to prison camps, and during both world wars many German nationals and immigrants were subjected to surveillance and orders restricting their freedom to travel outside the areas where they lived.

In sum, political criminality is most realistically defined as whatever is treated as such by specified actors (usually governments, dominant groups, or their agents) who have the power to impose their conceptions in particular historical situations.

RESISTING AUTHORITY

Resistance to political authority may be more or less deliberate, organized, or planned. As noted above, even the appearance or potential of resistance may be sufficient for authorities to act against perceived challengers. Actual resisters may be engaged in activities ranging from merely disrespectful comments to the most violent assaults, from spontaneous eruptions to carefully orchestrated attacks, from individually motivated acts to organized strategies of rebellion. Acts of resistance may be categorized as evasion, dissent, disobedience, or violence.

Resisters may simply evade the orders and demands of the powerful. Avoiding masters, bosses, tax collectors, and military conscription has generally been safer than explicit defiance—be- cause open defiance tends to force authorities to

respond, while tacit evasion is more easily ignored or minimized. Russian serfs learned in such instances as the St. Petersburg massacre how ruthless the Cossacks could be in suppressing dissenters and petitioners—the kind of lesson that has been taught to peasants and workers over the centuries in many lands. As Karl Marx complained, peasants and industrial workers tend to settle for mere survival and small gains instead of becoming revolutionaries. Fear of brutal repression is not groundless, and those with little social power are realistically skeptical even in democratic societies (as regularly shown in legal and political attitude polls) of notions that they can expect protection because they have legal rights.

The right to speak out against authority is enshrined in many legal traditions but in practice is limited by the varying tolerance of authorities and people—decidedly lower in wartime and economic hard times. After centuries of attempting to deter such offenses as seditious libel and treasonous utterances, more democratic governments have de facto concluded that the effort is incompatible with the concept of free speech (Law Commission 1977; Stone 1983; Hurst 1983; cf. Franks 1989). However, other labels may be invoked to authorize punishing those whose dissent is especially galling, especially when authorities feel particularly threatened. U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, for instance, achieved the lasting notoriety of ‘‘McCarthyism’’ by making freewheeling accusations of ‘‘subversion’’ against a wide spectrum of targets—from known communists to President Dwight Eisenhower. Though McCarthy’s failure to refrain from smearing the president and the army, both icons in 1950s America, resulted in his downfall, the political climate remained one in which public objections to capitalism, American foreign policies, and even racial segregation carried the risk of being labeled a ‘‘communist’’ or at least a ‘‘fellow traveler.’’

Dissenting is one thing, but actually disobeying rules and commands is another. Lower-class people have historically suffered many demonstrations of their vulnerability, and so have characteristically been less likely than higher-class people either to dissent or to disobey overtly (Turk 1982a, pp. 69–114). On the other hand, dissenting or disobedient higher-class, especially youthful, resisters have typically been subjected to less punitive treatment. For instance, sentences of Vietnam

draft resisters decreased in response to the political repercussions of imprisoning growing numbers of higher-class young men (Hagan and Bernstein 1979). Not surprisingly, civil disobedience has been more likely to be a higher-class than a lower-class mode of resistance—that is, a tactic of those whose backgrounds encourage them to believe, perhaps erroneously, in their own significance and efficacy and in legal rights and protections. Certainly in the 1960s, in the early stages of the civil rights movement, marchers against southern segregation were far more likely to be students, intellectuals, and ‘‘bourgeois’’ than laborers, farmers, and ‘‘proletarians.’’

Violent resistance by individuals and small organizations seldom threatens authority structures directly, but does indirectly weaken them in that authorities facing or fearing violence typically adopt extralegal and repressive control measures— which contradict beliefs in legal restraints on governmental power. The more actually and ideologically democratic the political order, the greater the contradiction—which is associated with the greater vulnerability of democratic than despotic regimes to terrorism (Turk 1982b, p. 127).

Political violence tends to escalate from coercive to injurious to destructive forms, in an interaction spiral generated by decreasing hope on the side of one or both parties of an acceptable accommodation and/or by perceived advantages in escalation (Turk 1996). Coercive violence, which may complement or succeed verbal or legal appeals and arguments, is intended to pressure opponents to change their policies or practices—typical acts being telephoned threats, disruption of communications, and rioting. Injurious violence is aimed at causing limited damage to property or persons, with little or no risk of lethal damage, when opponents do not respond satisfactorily to coercion— as when Quebec separatists blew up mailboxes and American student radicals firebombed Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) buildings on university campuses. Torture and execution mark the transition from injurious to destructive violence. Destructive violence seeks to terrify active and potential opponents and to eliminate the enemy’s resources of personnel, supplies, and facilities; examples include the assassinations of governmental (or revolutionary) leaders, as well as acts of terrorism (e.g., the Oklahoma City bombing).

Political offenders have commonly been viewed as morally or mentally defective. However, even the most violent assassins and terrorists appear unlikely to exhibit psychopathology (Turk 1983, 1984, p. 123; cf. Schafer 1974; also Robins and Post 1997). The effort to understand political resisters begins in recognizing that they may vary enormously in political consciousness and motivation, organizational involvement, and readiness to commit violent acts, in addition to other characteristics, such as class origins. Distinctions must be made among deliberate political actors, emotional reactors to climates of political instability and violence, and apolitical opportunists such as ordinary criminals who merely seek to profit from their contacts with resistance figures and movements.

ASSERTING AUTHORITY

Political dominance is defended legally and often extralegally at all institutional levels. The highest and broadest level is typified by national (and increasingly international) policies of insulation (regulating access and mobility, e.g., through immigration and licensing laws), sanctioning (defining and enforcing behavioral rules, e.g., through criminal laws), and persuasion (disseminating favored communications, e.g., through education and censorship)—that is, through statecraft, governing strategies designed to ensure that potential resisters lack the opportunities, resources, and will to challenge authority (Gamson 1968). More specifically focused on controlling resistance is political policing—the organized effort to gather relevant intelligence, manipulate channels of communication, neutralize opposition, and deter challenges.

Because the value of information can never be fully anticipated, intelligence gathering is inherently limitless. Advancing technologies of surveillance and analysis enable ever more extensive and intensive monitoring of human behavior and relationships. The distinction between public and private is increasingly dubious in both law and practice. Recurring legislative and judicial efforts to impose legal restraints have occasionally slowed but never stopped the trend (Marx 1988). One of the most celebrated efforts—to end surveillance of civilians by U.S. Army intelligence officers— failed when the highest court ruled in 1972 ‘‘that it was not the business of the Supreme Court but of

Congress to monitor executive practices like surveillance’’ (Jensen 1991, p. 255).

Authorities have never been entirely comfortable with the ideal of free and open communications. Even where that ideal has been most firmly asserted in law, in practice the right to disseminate critical information and ideas has been limited (Kittrie and Wedlock 1998, passim). Openly or subtly, communications favoring the status quo have been facilitated, while dissent has been inhibited to a greater or lesser degree. For example, Eugene Debs (leader of the Socialist Party) was convicted and imprisoned not explicitly for his outspoken opposition to American involvement in World War I, but instead for ‘‘conspiracy’’ to obstruct military conscription and war produc- tion—a charge under the Espionage Act of 1917, which required no direct evidence of either conspiracy or obstructive actions.

When resistance is encountered, some blend of enclosure and terror tactics is used—that is, a combination of methods designed not only to suppress resistance but also to convince offenders that apprehension is inevitable and punishment unbearably severe. Psychological as well as physical coercion is accomplished by subjecting targets to sanctions varying from character assassination to torture and extermination. An example of the first is the FBI’s effort to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr., as a subversive agitator, a communist sympathizer or dupe, and an immoral womanizer. As for the second, South African apartheid forces provided many instances, including the beating death under interrogation of Steve Biko, leading voice of the ‘‘black consciousness’’ movement.

International covenants notwithstanding, torture and other violations of human rights continue throughout the world (regularly documented by Amnesty International and other organizations). Extreme human rights abuses are reported not only in dictatorships such as Iraq and authoritarian regimes such as Sri Lanka but also in democracies such as Britain, India, Israel, and the United States. Clearly, authorities facing serious challenges are unlikely to be restrained by legal or other norms.

The ultimate goal of political policing is general deterrence. Insofar as the subject population does not knowingly and willingly accept the political order, fear and ignorance may still ensure

acquiescence. Surveillance, censorship, and neutralization are designed not only to repress political deviance but also to discourage any inclination to question the social order. But intimidation must be supplemented by persuasion if superior power is to be legitimated—transformed into authority. A classic technique is the political trial, in which legal formalities are used to portray the accused as a threat to society, to convey the impression that political policing is legally restrained, and to reinforce the sense that political dominance is both right and irresistible. Such trials have not been limited to totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (Kirchheimer 1961), but have also occurred with some regularity in democratic nations such as the United States. Historically, examples have occurred from the Puritans’ legalistic suppression of Anne Hutchinson to the Chicago trial for ‘‘conspiracy’’ of eight assorted radicals with varied causes, whose only link was that they ‘‘represented the spectrum of leftist dissidents’’ (Belknap 1994, p. 240; see also Christenson 1986).

RESEARCH AGENDAS

Studies of political criminality have raised far more questions than they have answered. In the future, it will be not isolated, small-scale investigations but ongoing research programs, that will be essential if the quest for systematic explanations of political criminality is to be successful. Such programs will necessarily be multilevel, integrating research on the political socialization of individuals, the radicalization of defenders as well as challengers of authority, the interaction of resistance and policing strategies, and the conditions under which the political organization of social life is relatively visible (low rates of both resistance and repression).

The viability of a political authority structure can in principle be objectively defined: The probability of its survival increases or decreases. Accordingly, research can identify progressive actions (which increase viability) and destructive actions (which decrease viability) by anyone involved in political conflict. Turk (1982a, pp. 181–191) hypothesizes that random violence, economic exploitation, and weakening social bonds are destructive, while nonviolent actions increasing the life chances of everyone instead of only some people are likely to be progressive.

REFERENCES

Barak, Gregg 1991 Crimes by the Capitalist State. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Belknap, Michal R. (ed.) 1994 American Political Trials. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

Christenson, Ron 1986 Political Trials: Gordian Knots in the Law. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction.

Franks, C. E. S. (ed.) 1989 Dissent and the State. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

Gamson, William A. 1968 Power and Discontent. Homewood,

Ill.: Dorsey.

Hagan, Frank E. 1997 Political Crime: Ideology and Criminality. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon.

Hagan, John, and Ilene Bernstein 1979 ‘‘Conflict in Context: The Sanctioning of Draft Resisters, 1963– 76.’’ Social Problems 27:109–122.

Tunnell, Kenneth D. (ed.) 1993 Political Crime in Contemporary America: A Critical Approach. New York: Garland.

Turk, Austin T. 1982a Political Criminality: The Defiance and Defense of Authority. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

———1982b ‘‘Social Dynamics of Terrorism.’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

463:119–128.

———1983 ‘‘Assassination’’ In Sanford H. Kadish, ed.,

Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice, vol. 1. New York: Free Press.

———1984 ‘‘Political Crime.’’ In Robert F. Meier, ed., Major Forms of Crime. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

———1996 ‘‘La violencia politica desde una perspectiva criminologica.’’ (Political Violence in Criminological Perspective) Sistema 132–133 (Junio):41–55.

Ingraham, Barton L. 1979 Political Crime in Europe: A Comparative Study of France, Germany and England. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jensen, Joan M. 1991 Army Surveillance in America, 1775– 1980. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Kirchheimer, Otto 1961 Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Kittrie, Nicholas N., and Eldon D. Wedlock, Jr. (eds.) 1998 The Tree of Liberty: A Documentary History of Rebellion and Political Crime in America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Law Commission 1977 Codification of the Criminal Law: Treason, Sedition, and Allied Offences. Working Paper 72. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Marx, Gary T. 1988 Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Robins, Robert S., and Jerrold M. Post 1997 Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Roebuck, Julian, and Stanley C. Weeber 1978 Political Crime in the United States: Analyzing Crimes by and against Government. New York: Praeger.

Ross, Jeffery Ian (ed.) 1995 Controlling State Crime: An Introduction. New York: Garland.

Schafer, Stephen 1974 The Political Criminal: The Problem of Morality and Crime. New York: Macmillan.

Stone, Geoffrey R. 1983 ‘‘Sedition’’ In Sanford H. Kadish, ed., Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice, vol. 4. New York: Free Press.

POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS

Investigations of the behaviors of political organizations occur at an intersection of sociology, political science, and organizations studies. This interdisciplinary perspective offers great potential for richly informed understanding and comprehensive theoretical explanation of numerous facets of these crucial social actors and their relationships with the larger society and polity in which they are embedded. Four fundamental questions have dominated research and theorizing in this field over the past several decades: (1) What sociopolitical conditions encourage the creation of political organizations? (2) How are participants recruited and induced to provide crucial resources for political action? (3) What mobilization processes enable political organizations to work together most effectively toward collective ends? (4) What strategies and tactics exert the greatest impact on public policy makers’ decisions? This article attempts to provide brief answers to these questions. Although most of the empirical research on political organizations concentrates on the United States, some recent evidence from European nations is examined.

The least restrictive definition of a political organization is any formally organized, named group that tries to influence the policy decisions of public officials. Most political organizations take the form of a voluntary association of persons or

organizations that pools its members’ and constituents’ financial and other resources, and engages in conventional political actions to affect policy-making outcomes. Common synonyms for this type of organization are ‘‘interest groups,’’ ‘‘pressure groups,’’ and ‘‘collective action organizations.’’ Ironically, political parties are not political organizations, because their primary purpose is to elect candidates to public office and only incidentally to press for specific policy agendas. Most public bureaucracies should be excluded, unless they act regularly to promote their own policy preferences within a government. Another questionable type is the social movement organization whose primary political tactics involve rallies, demonstrations, and violent forms of protest (including revolutionary actions intended to overthrow the government) rather than working within routine channels of the political system. Some social movement organizations eventually transform into conventional political interest groups, if they survive their turbulent youths as outside challengers. However, certain profit-making corporations might be considered quasi-political organizations, in instances where their government affairs officers lobby for preferential treatment from legislators and regulators (Salisbury 1994).

Political organizations—including such types as labor unions, professional societies, business and trade associations, churches, neighborhood and community organizations, fraternities and sororities, nationality and racial-ethnic federations, civic service, philanthropic, and cooperative groups, medical and legal societies, conservation leagues, and even recreational and hobby clubs—encom- pass a broad range of formal goals. Political purposes need not be their primary goal nor compose the majority of their activities, but the critical requirement is that they go beyond merely providing direct services to their members by seeking to change or preserve the social, economic, cultural, or legal conditions faced by their members or those on whose behalf they operate. One interesting type is the so-called citizens’ group or public interest group (PIG), which purports not to benefit narrow sectarian or economic self-interests but to promote the broader collective values of the society (Berry 1977). For example, civil rights, civil liberties, environmental protection, feminist, and consumer advocacy associations frequently proclaim a disinterested agenda. A close examination

of their supporters and activities suggests that they do not differ fundamentally from other political organizations in methods of operation (Schlozman and Tierney 1986, pp. 30–35). Based on listings compiled by various American directories, perhaps as many as 23,000 voluntary associations operate at the U.S. national level (many with dozens or hundreds of chapters and branches in state and local communities). Of these, perhaps half qualify as political organizations based on their efforts to communicate their positions on national policy issues to the federal government (Knoke 1990, p. 208). They range in size from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), with more than twenty-five million members, to small staff organizations with fewer than a dozen operatives bankrolled by foundations or public donations.

The creation, growth, and expansion of U.S. political organizations seem to occur in cycles corresponding to national political and economic events, including shifts in the legislative, regulatory, and judicial climate (Berry 1977, p. 13; Schlozman and Tierney 1986, pp. 74–82; Gray and Lowery 1996). American labor unions established a national policy presence during the New Deal, and public interest groups blossomed during the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist social movements of the 1960s. Business advocacy associations flocked to Washington in the 1970s and 1980s in reaction to restrictions imposed by newly established federal regulatory agencies for environment, occupational safety and health, consumer protection, and equal employment opportunity (Vogel 1996). Increasingly, mass membership associations have yielded ground to institutionally based organizations, including corporations; universities; foreign firms and governments; and confederations of U.S. state and local governments, such as the National League of Cities.

Interest groups rarely form spontaneously but require leadership and resources. Interest group foundings and expansions may be best understood as involving exchanges between entrepreneurial organizers, who invest capital in a set of benefits offered to potential members as the price of membership, and members who pay dues in order to receive these benefits. Intergroup subsidies may occur; for example, the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) founded the National Council of