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Talking Active Citizenship: Framing Welfare State Reform in England and the Netherlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2013

Imrat Verhoeven  and
Evelien Tonkens
Imrat Verhoeven
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam E-mail: i.verhoeven@uva.nl
Evelien Tonkens
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam E-mail: e.h.tonkens@uva.nl
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Abstract

This article reviews how activation policies frame citizens as individual welfare agents. The analysis focuses on the framing of feeling rules employed by governments that encourage active citizenship, in this instance in the Netherlands and England. In England, encouraging voluntarism is central to the Big Society agenda; in the Netherlands, it is at the heart of the 2007 Social Support Act and more recent ideas on citizenship. Governments cannot compel their citizens to volunteer their time; they can, however, try to seduce people by playing on their emotions. Based on an analysis of thirty-nine policy documents and political speeches, we find that English politicians employ ‘empowerment talk’ calculated to trigger positive feelings about being active citizens, while Dutch politicians employ ‘responsibility talk’ conveying negative feelings about failure to participate more actively in society. Responsibility talk runs the risk that citizens respond with counter-responsibility claims, whereas empowerment talk can fail to incite sufficient enthousiasm among citizens.

Type
Themed Section on Welfare State Reform, Recognition and Emotional Labour
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 415 - 426
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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