Abstract
Beyond the reaches of scholarly debates about how to define and value civility properly, social actors across various institutional domains routinely demarcate civil from uncivil behavior. Yet this everyday classification process remains understudied and undertheorized, despite being widespread and having significant stakes for the individuals and groups involved. This article begins to fill this gap by developing the concept of civility contests—practical efforts to draw symbolic boundaries between civil and uncivil individuals, groups, or behaviors. Through a focus on the realm of political protest in the United States, this article demonstrates that civility contests involve a wide range of political actors (including institutionalized power holders, opposing movements, and the media) who engage in this boundary-work in order to justify the control or (de)legitimation of protest. It then highlights patterned disparities in the outcomes of these contests, demonstrating that the likelihood of being marked as uncivil and the extent to which this prompts negative social sanction is shaped by one’s social position. Overall, the article seeks to stimulate and guide future empirical research on civility contests and to deepen theoretical understandings of the relationship between symbolic and social boundaries and the role of symbolic boundary-work in the reproduction of political inequality.
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Notes
Several recent studies have also developed perceptions of civility scales (Brooks and Geer 2007; Fridkin and Kenney 2008; Massaro and Stryker 2012; Mutz and Reeves 2005). Unfortunately, because these are presented as a means of demonstrating the validity of researcher-devised civility measures, interpretations of the scales have emphasized the degree of consensus among respondents about what behaviors count as uncivil. Missing is any discussion of whether this general “consensus” veils meaningful variation in respondents’ perceptions of civility (e.g., based on the identity of the observer or the actor whose behaviors were being judged).
Similarly, in Gieryn’s (1999) later work, he referred to “science wars” as “credibility contests” in which boundary-work plays a central role.
George Washington famously copied by hand a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” based on a book compiled by French Jesuits (Herbst 2010, p. 14).
More details about this research can be found in Braunstein (2017).
Oliver distinguishes between different kinds of “ethnic majority movements” based in part on their orientation toward ethnic minority groups (e.g., “hostile antiminority movements” versus “ally” movements) (2017, p. 395, see also pp. 402–404).
Oliver categorizes the women’s movement as a “subgroup-focused majority movement.” Although members of this movement may not identify collectively as part of the dominant ethnic majority, they nonetheless benefit from the privileges that accompany this social position.
This should not suggest women have been fully excluded from political life on this basis, and indeed, in other moments they have leveraged perceptions of their superior civility and “respectability” to gain political standing for themselves and the broader movements in which they participated (Clemens 1997; Higginbotham 1994).
Adams demonstrates the ways in which one’s position in relation to political and institutional power shapes one’s position within a civility contest. While as a revolutionary he rejected the legitimacy of civility norms, as president he signed the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which used incivility as a justification for expanding the president’s power to imprison or deport noncitizens who were “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” or who were critical of the government. These laws were broadly viewed as an effort to “silence and weaken” Adams’ political rivals (Library of Congress n.d.).
Krugman (2016) defines “bothsidesism” as “the almost pathological determination to portray politicians and their programs [on both sides of political debates] as being equally good or equally bad, no matter how ludicrous that pretense becomes.” This tendency is attributed to both the media’s habit of pursuing “objectivity” by taking “both sides” of any debate seriously (even when there is near consensus on one side of the issue), and politicians’ habit of deflecting blame by pointing fingers at the “other side.”
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank participants in the Politics of Social Change Workshop at the University of Connecticut (especially Andrew Deener and Erica Dollhopf), the Workshop in Cultural Sociology at Yale University, and the Public Discourse Project Seminar at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute for their feedback on previous versions of this article, as well as Craig Calhoun and the editors of “Participation and its Discontents,” a blog in collaboration with the ASA Political Sociology section (Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Pablo Lapegna, Philip Lewin, and David Smilde), for their comments on an early version of this argument. I also gratefully acknowledge support for this project from the UConn Humanities Institute’s Humility and Conviction in Public Life Project.
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Braunstein, R. Boundary-work and the demarcation of civil from uncivil protest in the United States: control, legitimacy, and political inequality. Theor Soc 47, 603–633 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9329-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9329-3