Ideations and Practices in Strengthening Contemporary Democratic Citizenship

The objective of the paper is to discuss the opportunities and limits in strengthening responsible democratic citizenship in the contemporary context of the Western democracies. The challenges such as mediatization, technocratization, disenchantment, radicalization, populism, securitization, digitalisation and others directly feed into the tensions in democratic citizenship but we need a more in-depth examination of these to make sense how. We also need to analyze the resources to address the challenges and innovate. Contemporary citizens need to navigate the contemporary tensions in practice finding an autonomous yet constructive and effective path between the radicalizing and depoliticizing trends. Here, democratic citizenship competences are extremely useful but to develop these we need to understand both the ideational and practice related aspects in developing the competences. This includes, on the one hand, making sense of the various ideations and normative perspectives embedded in democratic citizenship and developing integrity, reflectiveness and resilience vis a vis these different expectations. On the other, we also need to understand the practice related aspects from educational opportunities up to community and government linkages. The paper examines both the ideations and practices identifying pathways promising in contemporary contexts. The discussion is supported by empirical and practical material from the Horizon Europe Democrat project.