Laying the Foundations of the Social Republic: The Role of Rights Discourse in Left Party-Driven Movements

This thesis analyses the role conceptions of rights play in the political discourse of two left-wing party-driven movements which recently emerged in the UK and the US, those associated with the figures of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. It does so in order to illustrate and understand their broader ideologies. This task proceeds in two parts. Firstly, laying the ground for empirical analysis of this kind requires work in normative political theory. I analyse and examine different left wing understandings of rights that that might be expected to be associated with the movements in question. I begin by elucidating the liberal egalitarian approach associated with the work of John Rawls, and through this I also consider the Marxist critique of liberal egalitarian rights. Next, I articulate a novel social republican theory rights, one which is capable of integrating Marxist criticisms of the liberal egalitarian approach. The second element of this thesis is to utilise the component parts of the different conceptions of rights I have analysed and transform them into a framework with which to analyse the political discourse of the Corbyn and Sanders movements. I construct typologies based around four indicators which assess degrees of conformity to the liberal egalitarian or social republican accounts of rights, and I use these to perform a thematic analysis of selected speeches and policy documents which come from these movements. In doing this, I deploy a process conception of politics which takes into account relevant spatio-temporal contexts for the purposes of interpreting my findings from this analysis. Ultimately I find that, though there is some evidence which suggests that the label of liberal egalitarian or social democratic might be more appropriate, the social republican framing is the one which makes the most sense of both movements’ conceptions of rights and their wider ideology.