From citizenship to human rights: the stakes for democracy

A review of the literature on citizenship shows a trend away from anchoring citizenship practices to the nation-state and a move towards recasting the concept in universal terms. The paper examines this trend by focusing on the writings of Held, Bohman, and Benhabib. It distinguishes their ‘deliberative’ approach to citizenship, and suggests that this leads them to reformulate citizenship in a way which differs little from human rights. Although the paper shares in the view that a move to a human rights politics would pave the way for a more equitable order, it argues that there is also a risk. By drawing on the agonistic perspective on democratic politics, the paper shows that the risk is that we might undermine democratic politics by reducing it to a single principle.     

Citizenship and inclusion: rethinking the analytical category of noncitizenship

The paper problematises the category of noncitizenship. It traces its trajectory in accounts of inclusive citizenship and argues that it is difficult to theorise it as a distinct theoretical category outside of citizenship. To support this argument, the paper distinguishes between a pluralist, political and democratic variant of accounts of inclusive citizenship and it shows how they all end up reducing noncitizenship to a journey to citizenship. To overcome this limit, the paper develops the idea of subversive politicisation and suggests that injustices and inequalities can be challenged without falling back on the vocabulary of citizenship.     

Re-thinking urban citizenship for immigrants from a policy perspective: the case of Barcelona

This article proposes that the role of cities in immigrant integration be reconsidered through the prism of urban citizenship, looking at how local policies co-regulate immigrants’ status, rights and identity. It argues that urban citizenship connects two dominant understandings of citizenship, as city governments are under pressure to reconcile the normative perspective of formal membership of the state with the claims for rights expressed by excluded parts of the urban citizenry. A case study of an inclusive way of regulating citizenship in Barcelona illustrates how a citizenship perspective can cast light on the specific ways in which cities regulate immigrant citizenship in interaction with higher levels of government, and highlights some of the levers cities possess to modify the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion of immigrants locally.     

Role conflict and the limits of state identity: the case of Indonesia in democracy promotion

This paper aims to analyse why Indonesia projects democracy as a state identity by taking on the role of democracy promoter? This paper argues that Indonesia's aspiring role as a democracy promoter is not a manifestation of a firm and coherent democratic political culture, which is more likely to be a permanent feature of states. Thus, rather than seeing it as firmly established state identity, instead, Indonesia's democratic identity should be seen as role conception articulated by foreign policy elites in its quest for international prestige. Its role as a democracy promoter has enabled Indonesia to enhance its other roles conceptions such as a regional leader in Southeast Asia as well as a bridge-builder at the global level. However, this paper further argues that Indonesia's role as a democracy promoter has also been hindered due to the inter-role conflicts arising from its enactment of multiple roles. As a result, Indonesia's enactment of the role as democracy promoter has relatively less impactful towards democratization in the region. To substantiate this argument, the paper examines Indonesia's strategies in promoting democracy and human rights in three case studies, namely Indonesia's role in mainstreaming human rights in ASEAN, Indonesia's democracy promotion through the Bali Democracy Forum, and Indonesia's engagement towards democratization in Myanmar.     

Citizenship,enclaves and earnings: comparing two cool countries

This paper uses the Canadian 2006 Census and the Swedish 2006 register data to analyse the citizenship effect on the relative earnings of immigrants, using instrumental variable regression to control for citizenship acquisition. We ask: ‘Is there a citizenship effect and if any, in which country is it that we find the largest effect and for which immigrant groups?’ We add one further dimension, asking if the size of the co-immigrant population in the municipality has an effect on earnings. We find that the impact of citizenship acquisition is substantial in both Canada and Sweden. However, the place of birth of immigrants is important. In most cases, immigrant women in Sweden enjoy a higher citizenship premium than is the case for immigrant women in Canada. Amongst men the picture is more mixed. Most European groups receive a larger citizenship premium in Canada as compared to Sweden. Being in a city with more immigrants of the same background is better for earnings in Sweden than in Canada. However, being in a city with a lot of immigrants (regardless of origin) is better in Canada as compared to Sweden.     

Sudan and South Sudan: identity,citizenship, and democracy in plural societies

This article discusses the institutional legacy of colonialism and how that has affected citizenship in Sudan and South Sudan. It argues that the colonial project made a legal distinction, especially in how citizenship was defined. It outlines problems facing Sudan and South Sudan and the challenges in managing a diverse population. It argues that a failure to build a democratic polity by resorting to ethnic federalism will divide the country along ethnic lines and prevent the emergence of a truly inclusive nation. Finally, the article discusses an alternative solution to the political crisis facing both Sudan and South Sudan, namely citizenship and the establishment of an inclusive framework to manage diverse populations within a unified nation. The article concludes with a discussion of the New Sudan Framework by situating it within the larger debate on democratic nation-building while also discussing its alignment with regional and international law.     

Dual citizenship and theories of democracy

Dual/multiple citizenship has become a widespread phenomenon in many parts of the world. This acceptance or tolerance of overlapping memberships in political communities represents an important element in the ongoing readjustment of the relationship between citizens and political communities in democratic systems. This article has two goals and parts. First, it evaluates dual citizenship from the perspective of five normative theories of democracy. Liberal and republican as well as multicultural and deliberative understandings of democracy deliver a broad spectrum of arguments in favour of dual citizenship. Only communitarians fear that dual citizenship endangers national democracies. Nevertheless, empirical evidence and national policies largely contradict these fears. The second part of the article reverses the perspective and shows that most theories of democracy do not only legitimate and facilitate the acceptance of dual citizenship – the phenomenon of multiple citizenships induces innovation in democratic theory in turn. A second look at the relationship between dual citizenship and theories of democracy reveals that dual citizenship stimulates refinements, expansions and reconceptualisations of these theories for a transnationalising world.     

Education and support for representative,direct and stealth democracy

Using data collected within the scope of a Dutch internet panel survey (LISS) in 2011, this study tracks public support for direct, stealth and representative democracy according to educational level. Our findings indicate that, in terms of overall support for each specific type of democracy, lower educated citizens are significantly more supportive of stealth and direct democracy than highly educated citizens. While the mean levels of support for representative democracy do not differ significantly between levels of education, multivariate OLS regression analyses show that lower educated citizens are noticeably more supportive of representative democracy once political efficacy, trust and satisfaction are introduced. When contrasting the different types of democracy directly with one another, we find that lower educated citizens have a greater tendency to prefer direct and (to a lesser extent) stealth democracy over representative democracy than higher educated citizens. Multivariate OLS regression analyses indicate that most of these educational gaps cease to be significant once the lower levels of political efficacy, trust and satisfaction of lower educated citizens are taken into account. Implications of these results for the debate on the functioning of democracy are discussed.     

Bernard Crick: citizenship and democracy in the United Kingdom

Bernard Crick's contribution to citizenship studies can be regarded as part of the tradition so ably represented by T.H. Marshall. I want to argue in this brief article on Crick that on the one hand he is part of the ‘golden age’ of political philosophy that has flourished in the English-speaking world over the last two or three decades, but on the other his work also shows the limitations of that tradition, at least from the perspective of comparative and historical studies in political sociology. His work was unquestionably ‘local’ in its focus on the subject of Scottish independence and the viability of the British Isles under the governance of a multi-national state.     

Fragmented citizenship in a religious-national democracy: homosexuals in Israel

Fragmented citizenship has been a concept describing a deficit in the rights granted to citizens, which may be subject to fluctuations. This paper suggests that the expansion of citizenship is connected to an ideational shift while fragmentation occurs when institutional structures and core values inhibit change in certain areas. The case under discussion is the status of homosexuals in Israel. The country has been described as a gay-friendly society where homosexuals enjoy a plethora of socio-economic rights on the one hand, but are denied marital rights on the other. Expansion of citizenship was made possible owing to a gradual process of liberalization and growing institutional receptivity. This however, did not conclude with the full social inclusion of Israeli homosexuals but rather with citizenship fragmentation. Granting full citizenship rights would have been incompatible with Jewish national core values backed by the institutional autonomy utilized by resistant veto actors.     

宪政与民主的复杂关系

从民主的角度对宪政进行定义是一种普遍的方式。因为,民主和宪政具有和谐关系。这既体现在二者在理论基础、制度设计和价值目标上的相同之处,又体现在民主能对实现宪政的目标即限制权力有援助作用。但这种亲和性并不能掩盖民主与宪政潜在的差异。它们二者间甚至还可能存在潜在的冲突关系。因此,民主与宪政处于复杂的关系当中。     

Government effectiveness and support for democracy

Diffuse support for democracy, as captured in mass surveys, tends to be treated as impervious to regime performance. Such a finding is often presented as confirmation of the basic distinction between ‘diffuse’ and ‘specific’ support as proposed by David Easton. This study argues that this line of argument stems from an incomplete reading of important aspects of Easton's theorisation about the relationship between system outputs and diffuse support. Using multilevel models, evidence from more than 100 surveys in close to 80 countries, and different measures of democratic support, it is shown that government effectiveness is the strongest macro‐level predictor of such support. In democratic regimes, government effectiveness, understood as the quality of policy‐making formulation and implementation, is linked to higher levels of support for democracy. Furthermore, in non‐democracies, effectiveness and support for democracy are, under some model specifications, negatively related.     

Immigrant sexual citizenship: intersectional templates among Mexican gay immigrants to the USA

Existing literature on sexual citizenship has emphasized the sexuality-related claims of de jure citizens of nation-states, generally ignoring immigrants. Conversely, the literature on immigration rarely attends to the salience of sexual issues in understanding the social incorporation of migrants. This article seeks to fill the gap by theorizing and analyzing immigrant sexual citizenship. While some scholars of sexual citizenship have focused on the rights and recognition granted formally by the nation-state and others have stressed more diffuse, cultural perceptions of community and local belonging, we argue that the lived experiences of immigrant sexual citizenship call for multiscalar scrutiny of templates and practices of citizenship that bridge national policies with local connections. Analysis of ethnographic data from a study of 76 Mexican gay and bisexual male immigrants to San Diego, California, reveals the specific citizenship templates that these men encounter as they negotiate their intersecting social statuses as gay/bisexual and as immigrants (legal or undocumented); these include an ‘asylum’ template, a ‘rights’ template, and a ‘local attachments’ template. However, the complications of their intersecting identities constrain their capacity to claim immigrant sexual citizenship. The study underscores the importance of both intersectional and multiscalar approaches in research on citizenship as social practice.     

Policy framing and denizen enfranchisement in Portugal: why some migrant voters are more equal than others

The enfranchisement of non-citizens across different democracies has been mostly approached at with macro-explanations that propose national traditions of citizenship or transnational influences as remote causes, leading researchers to explain variation through some fuzzy balancing of the two. This article joins the more recent literature focusing on the meso-level, particularly on political discourses on denizen enfranchisement, to examine the deviating case of Portugal, based both on strict reciprocity and on differentiating clauses that divide non-citizen migrants into different universes of voters and non-voters. Such a case allows theoretical refinement of process-based and discursive approaches on denizen enfranchisement and shows that it succeeded in Portugal when parliamentarians framed it as a symbolically generous but practically restricted move that promised prestige gains vis-à-vis Europe and Portuguese emigrants.     

Theorizing Islamism and democracy: Jamaat-e-Islami in India

Liberal reading often posits Islamism as obverse of modernity and reason. Phil Briscoe's statement that Hitler's Mein Kampf might be kept in libraries but not the books by authors like Jamaat-e-Islami's founder's (Maududi) amply illustrates it. This article calls such an understanding into question. On the basis of my historical-ethnographic fieldwork on India's Jamaat-e-Islami and its offshoot, Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), I examine the interrelationships between Islamism and democracy showing Jamaat-e-Islami's moderation and SIMI's radicalization. It is my contention that Islamism and democracy are not antithetical to each other; they cohere in complex ways. When democracy is responsive to the traditions and aspirations of its Muslim citizens, Muslims relate to pluralism and democracy. But when democracy becomes majoritarian and a theater of entertainment and violence against Muslims, Islamists turn radical. I also suggest that radicalization such as SIMI's symbolizes a complex dynamic of democratization and demonopolization of religious authority. By foregrounding the salient transformation of Indian Islamism, this article aims to advance a nuanced, fresh understanding of both Islamism and democracy.     

Sustaining democracy: folk epistemology and social conflict

When political philosophers ask whether there is a philosophical justification for democracy, they are most frequently concerned with one of two queries. The first has to do with the relative merits of democracy as compared with other regimes. The second query has to do with the moral bindingness of democratic outcomes. But there is a third query we may be engaging when we are looking for a philosophical justification of democracy: what reason can be given to democratic citizens to pursue democratic means of social change when they are confronted with a democratic result that seems to them seriously objectionable or morally intolerable? In this paper I develop an epistemological response to the third query. The thesis is that we have sufficient epistemological reasons to be democrats. The epistemological norms that we take ourselves to be governed by can be satisfied only under certain social conditions, and these social conditions are best secured under democracy.     

Economic development and democracy: An electoral connection

Scholars continue to debate whether economic development affects regime type. This article argues that a clear relationship exists between development and the electoral component of democracy, but not – or at least less so – between development and other components of broader understandings of democracy. This is so because development enhances the power resources of citizens and elections provide a focal point for collective action. The theory is tested with two new datasets – Varieties of Democracy and Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy – that allow us to disaggregate the concept of democracy into meso- and micro-level indicators. Results of these tests corroborate the theory: only election-centred indicators are robustly associated with economic development. This may help to account for apparent inconsistencies across extant studies and shed light on the mechanisms at work in a much-studied relationship. Further analysis shows that development affects electoral democracy by reducing electoral fraud, election violence and vote buying.     

Democratic Political Competence: Clearing the Underbrush and a Controversial Proposal

Though the link between democracy and an appropriately trained citizen is obvious, the theoretical and empirical nature of this association is murky despite mountains of scholarship addressing this topic. Part of this problem is that the term democratic competence has been stretched almost to the point of uselessness. This constant adding of desired traits—many of which are ideologically driven—misdirects effort away from such complex problems as the relationship between individual attributes and collective capacities. Moreover, recent research has often been guilty of using data of uncertain relevance to demonstrate a competence that seems largely an analytical artifact. We conclude by offering an approach that stresses old- fashioned traits such as patriotism that seem necessary to the existing, and quite democratic, status quo.     

Electoral engineering in Chile: the electoral system and limited democracy

On the eve of Chile's transition from military to elected government, the outgoing regime enacted an electoral engineering project intended to conserve the constitutional order it encoded in 1980. An analysis of 1989 and 1993 general elections shows that the way votes are translated into seats favors, as intended, the second largest electoral block, the Chilean Right. This bias, along with the number of appointed senators and the special majorities required for constitutional amendments, gives the Right a minority veto power on any reform initiative. Moreover, the electoral system produces incentives for parties, candidates and voters that enhances this balance of power. The role that the electoral system plays in Chile therefore consolidates a limited form of democracy, rather than a liberal one.     

民主的形式之惑

民主,代表着人类进步和社会发展的文明化程度,是现代国家的一个基本标志,是现代公民的普遍追求和基本权利。但在对民主的认识上依然存在着一些需要廓清的基本问题,厘清这些问题对中国特色社会主义民主建设不可或缺,民主的形式之惑就是其中之一。