Resilience of Democratic Citizenship: Revisiting Citizenship Norms and Protest Activity in a Cross Country Analysis

Citizenship spaces and practices are increasingly negotiated under conditions of democratic backsliding, increased populist politics and rapid technological transformation. While spaces of citizenship expand, and the political contexts in which citizenship is actualized transform, the norms that define good citizenship or democratic citizenship may be challenged. Core assumptions about the relationship between citizens, political authority and civic engagement are being reshaped across not only authoritarian regimes but also new and established democracies. Protest activity continues to be a central site through which citizenship is enacted. This study asks how durable the normative foundations of protest politics are in contemporary democracies. This paper revisits the relationship between citizenship norms and protest activity by extending a longitudinal analysis originally conducted using ISSP Citizenship data from 2004 and 2014 (Cenker, Çakmaklı and Karakoç 2021). Drawing on recently released ISSP 2026 Citizenship data, the study examines whether citizenship norms continue to structure protest participation in similar ways, or whether their relative influence has shifted over the past decade. The analysis distinguishes between four dimensions of citizenship norms—rights-based, active, cosmopolitan, and dutiful—each rooted in different theoretical conceptions of citizenship and implying distinct relationships between citizens and political authority and hence expected to impact protest activity distinctly. The analysis spans more than twenty years and different democratic contexts, enabling an assessment of long-term change in the normative motivations of protest. The study provides insight into the stability and transformation of citizenship norms as drivers of political action, with implications for understanding protest’s role in contemporary democratic resilience and contestation. By linking normative theories of citizenship to long term behavioral outcomes, the findings will contribute to citizenship studies by assessing the resilience of the impact of norms on civic activity in changing political contexts.