Citizenship is as Citizenship Does: State/Citizen Interaction and the Perception of Personal Citizenship

My paper proposes investigating the importance of state/citizen interactions in forming how people feel about their own citizenship, and how these feelings should be taken seriously as a real factor of citizenship. Citizenship is often studied either as the black box of citizen/non-citizen, or a series of objective ‘rights and responsibilities’ criteria. While there are undeniably concrete implications to the category of legal citizenship which are theoretically equal for everyone holding the title of citizen, this does not translate to similarly equal treatment at the hands of the state. I argue that people understand this disparate treatment as reflective of the quality of their citizenship, and this in turn serves to instruct their use (or not) of their citizenship rights. How people understand and think of their own citizenship is an understudied aspect of citizenship in political science, but a crucial one if we are to further our understanding of the workings of citizenship among everyday people. It is important to understand the knowledge of ‘non elite’ political actors as a category of political knowledge worth taking seriously. To be able to act on the theoretically equal rights and responsibilities entailed by the possession of citizenship, people must believe and understand they will be able to do so successfully. However, if people’s interactions with the state regularly serve to inform them that the state is not interested in their exercise of that right, or will not fulfill this right, they are likely to think of their citizenship as diminished in some way, and less likely to exercise these theoretical rights. If people consistently do not exercise their rights because their interactions with the state indicate that they cannot, then they cannot reasonably be said to have such rights. Political science has done significant work providing evidence that interactions with the state serve to influence how people feel about the state, and their position within it. This is the backbone of policy feedback literature. While there are many interactions with the state that would serve as informative lenses through which to study this phenomenon, I propose that that of police violence and protection would serve as most illuminating. Foremost among the basic rights we understand as associated with citizenship tends to come state protection. We allow the state its monopoly on legitimate violence in exchange for protection. Hobbes’ bargain remains as relevant to citizenship today as it did in his time. In most states, this duty of protection most clearly falls to the institution of the police. However, what happens in communities where the police cannot be relied on to provide protection? Indeed, what happens when it is the police themselves that are the purveyors of violence? Do people in these communities think of themselves as citizens when one of their most basic rights as such has been consistently denied? Does this impact their exercise of or access to other citizenship rights?