Prospects for Citizenship

Gerry Stoker, Andrew Mason, Anthony McGrew, Chris Armstrong, David Owen, Graham Smith, Momoh Banya, Derek McGhee, Clare Saunders

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781474252898
• eBook ISBN: 9781849660754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Is citizenship in decline due to globalisation and an erosion of civic participation and democratic representation? Or is it merely transformed and extended to new levels and larger scales? Should we assess these challenges and changes primarily from a perspective of global justice, or consider also membership in a democratic polity as itself a basic good? Prospects for Citizenship addresses these broad questions in a unique collaborative effort. The result is an impressive book that looks at the future of citizenship from multiple research perspectives while remaining coherent in its overall purpose.
Rainer Bauböck, European University Institute, Florence This book offers a perspicuous overview of the prospects for citizenship in our contemporary political context. The authorial team draw on a wide range of empirical and normative research in order to offer an incisive analysis of the problems and pressures of citizenship in the twenty-first century. The authors focus in particular on the apparent decline of traditional forms of civic engagement, the emergence of new forms of participation and the relationship between citizenship and globalization.

CHAPTER ONE

Political Citizenship under Threat: Dimensions, Causes and Responses

There is a prima facie case for the proposition that our sense of political citizenship in national democracies appears to be under threat. That case rests simply on recalling your last conversation about politics with a fellow citizen. In that conversation they will have, quite likely, expressed a sense of uneasiness about politics and a view that they feel relatively powerless in the face of machinations of formal politics. Popular political culture in many mature and new democracies is tinged with a strong sense of being ‘anti’ both politics and politicians. Many citizens hold that politics is ‘synonymous with sleaze, corruption, and duplicity, greed, self-interest and self-importance, interference, inefficiency and intransigence. It is, at best, a necessary evil, at worst an entirely malevolent force that needs to be kept in check’ (Hay 2007: 153). Yet faith in politics as a mechanism for solving collective action problems and a sense that you, as a citizen, have a capacity and orientation to play a positive role in politics are central to political citizenship. That sense of political citizenship in many national democracies could reasonably be described as under threat.

Maybe we do not so much hate politics as see it as in increasingly pointless activity. There is a demand and a supply side in the threat to political citizenship (Hay 2007). Many citizens, it appears, fail to fully appreciate that politics in the end involves the collective imposition of decisions, demands a complex communication process and generally produces messy compromise. In short, politics found itself out of step with the dominant self-actualizing and individualistic narrative of the neo-liberal era. But it is the supply side of the argument that has the greater magnitude and momentum. On the supply side the space for politics is being squeezed by processes of depoliticization, the professionalization of politics, globalization and privatization. More decisions are handed over to institutions beyond popular politics; the forces of global economy and society appear to be taking issues beyond nationally based politics, and key aspects of public goods and services are managed through private companies and institutions.

Democracy needs citizens to value political citizenship yet in many democracies it appears that connection is under threat. I want to dismiss at the outset the idea that there was a golden age of political citizenship or that a positive sense of citizenship implies all citizens acting with sustained virtue. Most citizens in the founding days of mass democracy probably never especially trusted politicians or liked doing politics. Moreover, politics is not necessarily noble; it can reflect self-interest. Its practice is often boring rather than inspiring and its successful outcomes are often messy and full of compromise. Yet it does demand a public morality of taking into account the views of others and adjusting your position accordingly rather than the private morality of sticking to your principles no matter what. Political citizenship does make uncomfortable demands on us. The opening of this chapter requires us to address the issue of what would make for a good civic culture, one with a positive sense of political citizenship.

In established and new democracies there is a danger that many – even a majority of – citizens have no positive sense of political citizenship, and that this in turn provides the base for a potential undermining of a commitment to democratic principles and practices. Evidence about a malaise within politics can be presented from a range of countries but given limits of time and evidence the discussion about decline is restricted to Europe and the United States. The analysis then turns to examine in greater depth explanations for that malaise and finally it asks what if anything could be done to restore a stronger sense of political citizenship. The discussion then closes with a plea for more research into how citizens understand politics.

The Dimensions of Political Citizenship

Pattie et al. (2004: 22) argue that citizenship revolves around ‘a set of norms, values and practices designed to solve collective action problems’. The core problem addressed by political citizenship is how to establish an orientation and set of practices towards our fellow citizens that make it possible for us to commit together to solve shared challenges without resort to violence or unnecessary coercion. The issue of the nature of ‘good’ political citizenship has been a focus of intellectual reflection and practical debate for over 2000 years (see Pattie et al. 2004: 5–22). My focus is on a more narrow concern: What orientation do citizens need to have towards politics in modern democracies in order to support a commitment to their polity? This I might describe as the starting base for any meaningful sense of political citizenship.

An interesting point of departure in pursing a response to this question is provided by Almond and Verba’s (1963) classic study of the civic culture of five nations. It compared Great Britain with the United States, Germany, Italy and Mexico. Culture for these two American authors constituted the broad orientation of citizens towards their political system and their sense of citizenship, measured by way of attitudinal and behavioural data collected through a series of national surveys. The book may be a classic but it is also the focus for a substantial range of criticisms. The dominant view of the Almond and Verba thesis is that it was a pioneering but seriously flawed effort at understanding civic culture. There have been criticisms from academics about the theories underlying the work in that Almond and Verba appeared to sustain a very elitist understanding of democratic practice and a rather individualistic understanding of culture. The empirical findings of the study have also been questioned. The United States and the United Kingdom in the Almond and Verba study were both seen as blessed with citizens furnished with different but supportive civic cultures for modern democracy. Other countries were designated as having some key ingredients missing. Some disputed the findings. Others disputed the interpretation offered by Almond and Verba. Almost as soon as the book was published, many suggested that the cultures they had described even if they had been captured effectively were within a decade or so gone. Almond and Verba gave a fair hearing to many of the criticisms in The Civic Culture Revisited, a book published about two decades after the original study (Almond and Verba 1980). But from that point onward the work somewhat faded from view. There is a case for bringing it back under scrutiny.

What I propose is that there may be some advantage in returning to examine the conceptual framework underlying the work. The key conceptual work in The Civic Culture is done by a distinction between three types of political culture. Each type captures a citizen orientation towards their polity. The first is the parochial political culture where the citizen has little direct contact with the formal and specialized agencies of government and spends much of their time unaware of the political system. The example in the mind of the authors is a village tribe member in a large-scale colonial or former colonial state where the reach of government is limited. The second orientation is referred to as the subject political culture. Here the orientation of the citizen is as an observer with an awareness of the political system in general but a lack of engagement with it on particular issues. This orientation is used later in the book to characterize a substantial element in British political culture as deferential. But deference towards the political system is only one response that could be in tune with Almond and Verba’s subject culture. The subject culture can lead to citizens seeing the political system as legitimate or in a more negative light. Crucially, it is rather defined by its passive orientation towards the outputs of the system. The crucial question for subject political culture is: Does the political system deliver? Finally the participant political culture is one where citizens understand the political system and are orientated towards being actively engaged with it both in general terms and over particular issues. Again that engagement may lead to positive or negative elevations of the political system but the orientation towards engagement remains.

The final element in the analysis offered by Almond and Verba is to specify those combinations of cultures that are seen as supportive of democracy: low levels of parochialism but a mix of strong subject and participant are seen as key. Thus, in their study of Britain in the late 1950s, the picture is of a country at ease with itself: citizens deferential and respectful of their leaders but confident of their role and capacities and the responsiveness of government. Almond and Verba (1963: 455) comment about politics in Great Britain:

The participant role is highly developed. Exposure to politics, interest, involvement, and a sense of competence are relatively high. There are norms supporting political activity, as well as emotional involvement in elections and system affect. And attachment to the system is a balanced one: there is general system pride as well as satisfaction with specific governmental performance.

British citizens were more deferential than their American counterparts but this aspect of their culture was balanced by an active and participative orientation towards politics: a blend of activity and passivity that according to Almond and Verba allowed a civic culture to develop. The American route was different with a stronger emphasis on participation, but it too involved a mix of cultures that allowed a positive form of citizenship to emerge. Looking back from a distance of fifty years and more – as the later sections of this chapter will show – it becomes possible to see that the empirical world described by Almond and Verba in both Great Britain and the United States has gone. The conceptual framework could, perhaps, be reinvigorated in the light of current developments.

In our globalized world where decisions are made in locations that are hidden from, or at least opaque to, many citizens it would appear that a parochial perspective by citizens might have enhanced its relevance. Whereas for Almond and Verba the parochial perspective was a throwback to traditional societies and under challenge from modernization, in today’s global world we may all perceive our citizenship in parochial terms, where decisions are made by distant figures of whom we are mostly unaware. The subject perspective would appear to have sustained its relevance as politics but become less ideological and more focused on issues of management and delivery. It appears the participant perspective is the most obviously under threat, although it may be that citizens have sustained or advanced their view of their right to influence collective decisions but found formal politics an increasingly unattractive vessel for carrying that interest.

The framework of parochial, subject and participant political cultures may still provide a relevant and valuable way of thinking about the composition of political citizenship in a country. They may have been in balance in the 1950s in the United States and Great Britain, enabling citizens and the governing political class to live comfortably with one another. But as we shall see below they have got out of kilter not only in those countries but also more widely. From the perspective of many citizens of democracies today, they are to an increasing extent parochials in a world governed by global or at least beyond national forces. They are willing participants in the world of political influence but disengaged by the practices of formal politics. They are subjects but ones who find the performance of politicians and the political system increasingly disappointing. Whereas Almond and Verba, in Britain and the United States, found participant citizens and satisfied subjects with few alienated parochials, we might find a rather different mix now and one undermining of political citizenship: displaying more alienated parochials, dissatisfied subjects and frustrated participants.

The Malaise in Political Citizenship

After a comprehensi...

Table of contents

• Prospects for Citizenship
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Tables
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: Political Citizenship under Threat: Dimensions, Causes and Responses
• CHAPTER TWO: Designing Political Citizenship
• CHAPTER THREE: Citizenship and Social Movement Protest
• CHAPTER FOUR: Citizenship, Cultural Diversity and Integration
• CHAPTER FIVE: Citizenship and the Politics of Rights
• CHAPTER SIX: Transpolitical Citizenship
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Diminishing Returns? Globalization and the Limits of Citizenship
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Global Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Futures?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index