Duty to Resist and Civil Disobedience in the Protection of Democratic Rights

At the most abstract level the protection of citizens’ rights in a democratic community is the collective responsibility of all citizens. With the creation of the democratic constitutional state, this collective responsibility is in part transferred to the state and its institutions in a moral division of labor where the primary responsibility rests with the state and only a secondary responsibility with ordinary citizens. The most important function of the democratic constitutional state is to protect and further the democratic rights of citizens, through the creation of democratic institutions, pursuing policies which promote the equal public and private autonomy of all and by providing legal guarantees which makes it possible for citizens to claim their rights when they are violated. At the same time, citizens contribute to the realization of freedom and equality of all through reproducing a liberal democratic political culture providing the basis for respectful democratic exchanges between equals and by acting towards each other in respectful and non-discriminatory ways in civil society and the economy. That is the ideal. However, when real states do not in fact protect or promote democratic rights of citizens and/or when organized interests deliberately seek to undermine them without the state being able or willing to protect them, the responsibility for their protection arguably reverts to the citizens. The paper discusses the extent to which citizens not only have a right to defend their democratic rights by resisting and counteracting non-democratic actors, institutional reforms and policies, but also whether they - considering the costs and risks involved - have a duty to do so. It draws on recent developments in the literature on principled (civil and uncivil) disobedience. It argues that citizens should seek to build alliances with each other which will make their collective efforts more likely to be effective by securing that they each do their part and, further, that under such conditions individual citizens would have an imperfect duty to resist undemocratic developments driven by public and private actors.