Political Dissent

Political dissent is a form of protest against specific policies, political decisions, or even a political system and culture in general. It is any action pursuing political change that operates outside common decisionmaking processes of a political society. It challenges established forms of political communication and can be individual or collective, spontaneous or organized. Dissent typically takes a moral ground and challenges legitimacy of political actions, programs, and institutions. It is studied, therefore, in social and political science, sociolegal studies, and legal philosophy.

Political systems of modern complex democratic societies are based on the circulation of power between government and opposition. Political opposition participates in the institutional framework of decisionmaking process and acts on the assumption of eventual movement from opposition to government. Modern party politics and pluralism are based on dissenting political programs and ideologies, and pluralistic dissent acquires a positive value within the conception of democratic society on the condition that dissenting views and conflictual relations are contained by a minimum democratic consensus. As Giovanni Sartori emphasized in his book The Theory of Democracy Revisited (1986), democratic societies can survive despite widespread dissenting views about basic democratic and liberal values. Politics based on pluralism and the notion of civil liberties and individual rights make various forms of protest, including dissent, a structural precondition of the democratic political system.

It is necessary, therefore, to distinguish this kind of operational dissent, which is intrinsic to the democratic political system, from political dissent, which is an external reaction to the political system. When addressing the topic of political dissent, political science and philosophy literature usually focuses on the second kind of dissent. In this sense, political dissent is commonly described as a form of protest that transgresses the government and opposition duality and its operational dissent, distances itself from immediate aspirations to achieve political power, and resorts to external criticisms of the political system and culture. At the same time, dissent does not confront the system by acts of terrorism or violence because dissidents would lose their higher moral ground and become political extremists and terrorists driven by the same power code similar to the system itself. Political dissent therefore has to be distinguished both from political opposition and violent resistance.

Dissent, based on moral criticism of the system and emphasising the system's illegitimacies, keeps its political character because it challenges political power and seeks to put governmental actions under public scrutiny. The moral context of political dissent becomes particularly strong when facing authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that lack the government or opposition structural difference and pluralism typical of liberal democracy. In this condition, dissidents simply have to confront the system from the outside and speak against political reality in general. They provide the only substitute for political functions of democratic opposition. Moral calls may be easily detected in pamphlets and writings of a number of dissidents with fundamentally different political views, from the post–World War II examples of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Wei Jingsheng to Aung San Suu Kyi and Oswaldo Payá. The dissent strategy is legitimized by moral principles of humanity and driven by the belief that there is a higher ground that is binding for all politics and law.

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