This workshop aims to address how recent changes in norms of good citizenship inform people’s political attitudes and behaviours. To examine the significance of mainstream (duty-based, engaged and passive norms) and novel norms of citizenship (e.g. sustainable and populist norms), international relevance of generational divides and their implications for democracy and civic education, we will facilitate an interdisciplinary conversation among scholars with expertise in diverse geographical regions. We therefore call for normative and empirical, small and large-scale contributions, with the workshop envisaged to serve as a backdrop for a special issue on norms of good citizenship.
There is little agreement about the meaning of “good citizenship”, what recent changes in related norms look like and what they signify for the future of democracy and civic education. Most accept the relevance of multiple, distinct norms, i.e. duty-based, engaged and passive norms (Almond & Verba 1963; Dalton 2020), but tend to have contradictory expectations about their implications for political behaviour, while paying little attention to social, educational and psychological processes (including political attitudes, emotions, and social identities), the stability of norms and regional, national, temporal, technological and socioeconomic contexts influences.
For example, addressing the decline in duty-based citizenship norms that inform people’s engagement in politics via traditional channels such as electoral and party politics, some draw attention to the crisis of advanced democracies (Putnam 2000; Wattenberg 2002), while others articulate a potential expansion in people’s behavioural repertoires (Barrett 2017; Lane 2020). Again others focus on a supposed generational gap, with young people considered as adopting engaged citizenship norms and taking part in issue-based politics (Hooghe & Oser 2015; Sloam & Henn 2021). More recently, studies highlighted that people tend to embrace multiple norms of citizenship simultaneously (Reichert 2016; Hooghe et al. 2016), including novel norms linked to populist and/or sustainable ideals (Schnaudt et al. 2021; Vaughan et al. 2022). This has sparked renewed concerns about a backsliding in democratic values (Bermeo 2016; Goodman 2022; Mauk 2020) and the ability of citizenship education to keep up with these changes (Wood et al. 2018; Sloam et al. 2021).
1: What is the meaning of “good citizenship” and how stable is it?
2: What are the main changes to norms of good citizenship and what explains these changes?
3: How are citizenship norms linked to social, educational, technological, psychological processes?
4: What are the key differences in norms across regional, national, temporal, socioeconomic contexts?
5: What are the implications of changes in norms for democracy and civic education?
1: Theoretical, conceptual and empirical perspectives on “good citizenship”
2: Interdisciplinary assessments on norms of (good) citizenship
3: Implications of citizenship norms for political behaviour and attitudes
4: Regional, national, temporal assessments of citizenship norms, esp. outside advanced democracies
5: The role of social, technological and educational processes in the development of norms
6: Psychological processes involving attitudes, emotions, identities related to citizenship norms
7: Implications of citizenship norms for civic education
8: Implications of citizenship norms for democracy
