The aim of progressive politics is to bring about a different
kind of society from the one we currently inhabit. For a
long time now, progressives have pinned their hopes of achieving
change through the medium of legislative institutions, and
through reform of these institutions themselves. As the
limited nature of what our current institutions can achieve
become clear, so too does the need to rethink what we need
to do to achieve the aims of progressive politics. As Douglas
Alexander argued in the last issue of Renewal, the transformational
project of New Labour has to be founded in the renewal of
a public realm characterised by an egalitarian citizenship.
This public realm must encompass not just the traditional
institutions of high politics but also the wider social
world. It is time to look beyond institutional change to
wider social change. This essay argues for the need for
a more active conception of citizenship that can be exercised
and embraced by citizens in their everyday lives. Passive
citizenship as primarily expressed in the activity of voting
is not enough if we are to move beyond the politics of accommodation.
To understand why, we need to delve deeper into what can
motivate people to act, think and behave like citizens not
just consumers.
Passive and active citizenship
Many definitions of citizenship start with a form of equal
standing in politics underwritten by institutional guarantees
of a set of rights and entitlements. For those whose conception
of citizenship stops here, the main purpose of these rights
and entitlements are to allow people to pursue their private
ends. This narrow, functional view of citizenship still
depends on some kind of citizenship participation to ensure
that political institutions are stable and legitimate, namely
voting and law abidingness. The archetypal citizenship activity
of voting at regular elections is required to ensure that
political institutions and representatives remain true to
their function. However, declining levels of voting reflect
the problems with justifying the rationality of voting to
individuals, particularly when construed in narrow instrumental
terms. One of the most commonly cited reasons for not voting
is that the individual voter feels it doesn't make a difference.
The other kind of behaviour citizens are required to observe
is the duty of voluntary compliance with the outcome of
political processes, i.e. the law. Although coercive mechanisms
ensure that cases of non-compliance are dealt with, these
enforcement institutions still depend crucially on most
citizens being law-abiding. This passive conception of citizenship
conceives of relationships between citizens as largely mediated
by the state. This explains the focus on the vertical relationship
between citizens and the state. While the activity of voting
and compliance with the law are important components of
that relationship, they are fundamentally about upholding
the character of political institutions rather than about
changing citizens' relationships with other citizens. Those
who argue for more active forms of citizenship place a greater
emphasis on the horizontal relationships between citizens
and on a shared sense of identity. Citizenship here is primarily
about the quality of citizens' relationships with each other,
and how well they express a social ideal of a progressive
political community of mutual concern for each other. The
statecitizen relationship is therefore only one component,
albeit an important one in that relationship. Active citizenship
therefore contains both a wider and a more demanding conception
of political and civic engagement. For this reason it is
often viewed as veering towards uncomfortably collectivist
ideals that curtail what individuals choose to do within
their own private lives.
But what motivates citizens to be politically and civicly
engaged? How to restore voter turnout to its postwar levels
is an issue to which no convincing solution has yet emerged.
Certainly many contemporary social forces explain the growing
reluctance to engage; contemporary liberal societies are
marked by individualism and by a pluralism of beliefs that
underpins the emphasis on people pursuing their own private
ends. Narrow political participation in the form of voting
is unlikely to increase unless we are able to change people's
view of citizenship and what it means for themselves and
their relationship to each other. We need a thicker, more
active conception of citizenship in which citizens view
civic engagement not simply as something that happens every
4 or 5 years but as continuous with, and woven into the
fabric of their own lives and values.
Adopting a more substantial conception of citizenship that
is more prescriptive of what citizens ought to be and to
do raises a familiar issue of the tension between the demands
of citizenship and the individual. Ever since Benjamin Constant
noted the difference between ancient and modern conceptions
of liberty, modern sensibilities have turned away from the
more full-blooded, over-demanding notion of dutiful citizenship
advocated by Aristotle and Rousseau. However, the case needs
to be made that the pendulum has swung too far and that
balance needs to be restored. Without some conception of
citizenship as a shared identity in which we are citizens
united in the pursuit of the common good of a just society,
the possibilities for a transformational progressive politics
will remain elusive.
Progressive politics and active citizenship
Why do progressives need a conception of active citizenship
that extends beyond occasional attendance at the ballot
box? First, while voting may well be the key means of preserving
the legitimacy of a set of institutions, progressive politics
aims for more than this. Stable and generally legitimate
political institutions are not enough. Regular elections
in which a healthy majority of voters take part are indeed
an important safeguard of legitimate democratic institutions.
However, this legitimacy is also tarnished by the fact that
unequal resources tend to find ways of undermining truly
equal representation of all citizens. Furthermore, in so
far as political and social change is made to rely on the
outcome of the vote, it has thus far proved a fairly ineffectual
means by which to create a more progressive and egalitarian
society. Votes may sometimes sanction political change,
but they tend to reflect social change rather than create
it.
Second, the state cannot be the sole agent of progressive
change. Most political commentators focus on what the government
should be doing to bring about progressive society without
recognising that the state operates in a defined and constrained
social space. What governments can do is circumscribed by
a societal mandate that, of necessity, reflects the limits
and constrains the scope of possibilities. How willing a
society is to countenance redistribution depends on how
voters react to the implementation of redistributive policies.
Changing the parameters within which governments can act
requires changing attitudes and behaviours. As G.A. Cohen
has so eloquently argued, unless there is an ethos of justice
that informs individual choices, it is hard to see why citizens
would willingly submit to institutions whose aims conflict
with their self-seeking behaviour (Cohen 2000). Any radical
and progressive change in social and economic arrangements
requires a wider supporting ethos in society.
A third reason for an active conception of citizenship
arises from the fact that progressive and just institutions
depend for their long term stability upon an effective and
shared sense of justice among citizens. If people obey institutions
and the law because of the instrumental benefits they deliver
for their own private pursuits, rather than because they
value belonging to a just society, then that society is
less than stable. Stable and sustainable just institutions
require citizens to be ready to put the common good before
their own private interests when the need arises. Should
there be deviations from the norm - some momentary institutional
instability - people may be quicker to withhold their co-operation
and compliance. According to John Rawls, a stable society
is one which possesses the capability to deal with these
deviations by invoking rectifying social forces or tendencies
which can prevail and bring the system back into 'equilibrium'.
These social forces are expressed through citizens' being
motivated by 'a strong and normally effective desire to
act as principles of justice require', even when it might,
in the short term, not be in their private interests (Rawls
1970).
Lastly, we need an active conception of citizenship if
we are to achieve a common good that is more than the collective
sum of each person's private goods. The common good here
is not simply defined as those public goods that everyone
has independent reason to want for their private ends but
which the market fails to produce because of externalities.
Rather the common good consists of socially constructed
goods, diffuse in nature, that are both collectively produced
and consumed (Raz 1988). The good of living in a just society
need not be an instrumental one. For example, one appreciates
and values living in a tolerant society (even if one is
not likely to face discrimination) or an educated one (even
if one no longer needs further education and has no children
who are in receipt of education). The common good of living
in a just society characterised by mutual concern is one
which we can only appreciate once we fully appropriate the
identity and ends of a citizen.
The expression of citizen identity
An active conception of citizenship is driven by values
and ends that are not just simply instrumentally valuable
for private individuals but also as shared ends in themselves.
Living in a society characterised by justice and citizens'
mutual concern for each other can be fully realised, by
its nature, only if it takes precedence over our own private
pursuits in certain key areas of life. How strongly we feel
ourselves as citizens, how the ends of citizenship figure
in each of our sets of values and perspectives, is key to
how well motivated we can be to act out our citizenship
duties. For Rawls, a stable and just society is one in which
individuals act on 'conception-dependent desires' that are
founded in a conception of citizenship. Being a citizen
becomes an ingrained part of who we are and what we do.
But how can such an identity be fostered? Citizenship education
is of course one important method by which these values
are taught. However, identity needs to be grounded in ongoing
relationships that are real and meaningful in practice and
reflected in our discourse and practices. Identity cannot
simply be self-generated; it must be reinforced by social
acceptance and given outlets for expression. All identities
but particularly shared identities are formed by practices
and relationships within which they are negotiated. Discursive
interaction is particularly important in creating a citizenship
identity. The public realm is characterised by what some
call public reason - the debate and the exchange of arguments
by reference to shared common values as citizens over the
actions of common institutions. This exercise of engagement
in public justification is a fundamental expression of mutual
concern and respect for each other as citizens. However
this discourse takes place in elevated institutions; in
parliaments, in poorly attended town hall meetings and in
courts of law far removed from citizens' lives and from
their consciousness.
Interaction within a public realm characterised by the
values of citizenship also develops and reinforces motivation
to co-operate and to act more generally on our citizenship
duties. Many psychological studies have shown that continuous
and repeated interaction characterised by fairness can be
effective in establishing a mutual sense of reciprocity
and trust and creates what Robert Putnam has called 'bridging
social capital'. A Swiss experiment showed that people were
more willing to contemplate shouldering the costs of siting
nuclear waste if they were involved in a collective decision-making
process and appealed to as citizens than if they were offered
money as private individuals (B. Frey and F. Oberholzer-Gee
1997).
If active citizenship is about fostering relationships
and identities strong enough to support the achievement
of progressive ends, it cannot be enough for citizens' relationships
to each other to be mediated solely by the state. The act
of voting is ultimately a non-interactive one. Indeed we
interact very little as citizens. The state of our public
political discourse and of the public realm is far from
ideal. Whereas public discourse is meant to represent a
common and shared language for people who have diverse ends,
it seems that getting along with others in today's society
now effectively requires treating the subject of politics
as taboo. The public realm in which ordinary citizens can
interact with each other as citizens and practise the use
of public reason is virtually moribund.
Consumerism and the public realm
The causes for the poverty of our public realm are many.
The social changes wrought by modernity, by economic liberalism
and globalisation have resulted in speeding up the crowding
out of the public by the pursuit of private ends in people's
lives.
The predominance of the private realm and the retreat of
the public realm has been increasingly characterised by
consumerism and the extension of the reach of the market.
With consumerism has grown an adherence to a view of economic
freedom with the seductive message that most things can
be bought with money. The appeal of this view should not
be underestimated - there are some important senses in which
the market has been liberating for individuals. Where societies
are characterised by exclusionary social structures, by
class, racial prejudice or sexism, the market provides a
way of getting around the barriers they throw up to certain
goods. It provides a depersonalised way of transacting with
others that is indifferent to race, gender or class prejudice
and which creates access to goods previously accessible
only to people of the right race, gender or class background.
Despite the new patterns in inequality that unfettered markets
have created, the market at least offers the nominal chance
of escaping inequality.
With this depersonalised freedom, however, has come greater
individualisation of consumption and production. The auto-regulatory
qualities of the market - the invisible hand - has led to
the wider idea that all individuals need to worry about
is pursuing one's own private preferences. While it may
undermine traditional and often oppressive social understandings
and social bonds it has not put anything else in its place
that can strengthen the public realm of citizenship. It
leads to the underproduction of both public goods in the
economists' sense as well as of the socially constructed
goods that characterise the common good. The depersonalisation
and individualisation of decisions about production and
consumption reduces the scope for engagement in relationships
that can build interpersonal trust and social capital through
collective decision-making on consumption and production.
The ordered 'anarchy' of the market makes avoidable the
repeated interaction that gives rise to stable relationships
and offers little space for collective discussion about
the common good and its relation to private preferences.
In a society where the main form of interaction between
its members is through the market, the scope for the exercise
of public reason and public justification is limited. No
wonder then that consumer identity is so much more constitutive
of how people see themselves than citizenship.
The public realm and public services
The growth of markets in society succeeds in undermining
citizenship only if we let the private sphere of the market
overshadow the public realm. For too long now, the scope
for renewing and revitalising the public realm has been
locked up in a conception of a monolithic, bureaucratic
service state that administers to deferential subjects on
the grounds that they know best. Where there could have
been an extension of real democratic decision-making through
the devolution of power to citizens to decide for themselves
what services they want, there has instead been rule by
bureaucrats. The direction of the expansion of the post
war state represented a wasted opportunity to unleash the
potential for realising a modern public realm within which
citizens can interact, express and develop a mutual concern
for each other. I have argued elsewhere that the route to
a renewed civic realm must involve citizens as active partners
in the production, design, delivery and evaluation of their
public services (Chen 2003). The devolution of power to
public service institutions is only properly power to the
people if there are open processes of decision-making which
actively seek to engage those who have a stake in these
services as citizens and users. Many other reasons for greater
citizenship involvement exist, not least the improvement
in the quality of the services themselves. However, the
need for better services is no more important, in the long
run, than the need to reassert a public realm in which civic
relationships and an effective sense of citizenship and
reciprocal justice can be given space to develop and flourish.
While there are many kinds of market-derived reforms in
public services, not all of which need be inherently incompatible
with more citizen involvement in public services, their
potential impact on citizenship identity and motivation
must be considered. Clearly, valuable lessons about how
to improve the quality and delivery of public services can
be drawn from the experience of the private sector. However
it is also important to monitor how these innovations and
changes in structure impact upon our citizenship identity
and whether they crowd out the space for public interaction
and decision-making.
In particular, when citizens are encouraged to act as private
consumers in their use of public goods, they are likely
to be conditioned to choose as private consumers do; on
the basis of individual private preferences rather than
social ones. Our orientation and behaviour can then alter
the nature of a collective good, rendering it essentially
a private good rather than part of the common good. The
issues over the choice of private or public schooling illustrate
the ways in which different motivations for choosing can
affect the nature and the distribution of a good (Swift
2003).
Secondly, individuals' perception of public institutions
may change in ways that do little for civic engagement,
even in its minimalist forms. It has been suggested, for
example, that levels of voting in local government elections
are low because local government has come to be seen primarily
as a producer of services and less as a political entity:
'in other words, they see the local council more from a
consumer perspective than from the perspective of political
co-determination' (Eriksen and Weingard). In A.O. Hirshman's
terminology, they tend to exercise individual 'exit' rather
than collective 'voice'. The emphasis of much public service
reform on delivery fails to recognise that the processes
are as important as outcomes, both for outcomes themselves,
as well as for the public realm.
Progressive politics needs an active conception of citizenship.
The common good of a progressive society can be embraced
and achieved only if citizenship is a substantial part of
people's identities. The scope for passive and instrumental
conceptions of citizenship to bring about radical political
and social change, particularly in consumer-oriented societies
such as ours, is extremely limited.
To this end, active citizenship requires that there be
a public realm of mutual interaction and decision-making
in which the identity and values of citizenship can be expressed
and reinforced. So long as we continue to be satisfied with
passive citizenship the potential for truly progressive
change remains only a distant prospect.
Selina Chen is visiting fellow at King's College
London where she is writing a book with Professor Raymond
Plant on citizenship.
Endnotes
Chen, S. (2003) The Fifth Pillar: Active citizenship and
public service reform, Social Market Foundation.
Cohen, G.A (2000) If You are an egalitarian, How come you
are so rich?, Harvard University Press.
Eriksen, E. and J. Weingard (2002) 'The end of citizenship?
New roles challenging the political
order' in McKinnon and Hampsher-Monk (eds) The Demands of
Citizenship, Continuum.
Frey, B. and F. Oberholzer-Gee (1997) 'The Cost of Price
Incentives: an empirical analysis of motivation crowding-out',
American Economic Review, 87(4): 746-55.
Rawls, J. (1970) A Theory of Justice, Part III, Harvard
University Press.
Raz, J. (1988) The Morality of Freedom, Oxford University
Press.
Swift, A. (2003) How not to be a Hypocrite: School choice
for the morally perplexed Routledge, Falmer.
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