This chapter examines practical forms of citizen engagement occurring in collective problem-solving efforts such as civic enterprises, grassroots initiatives, and self-help groups. Drawing empirical evidence from diverse policy fields, it articulates the distinct experimental and disruptive policy work that citizens enact in these citizens’ governance spaces and challenges dominant interpretations that view them as either a testament to the capacity of citizens to effectively solve complex public problems or a symptom of advanced neoliberalism where states off-load complex problems onto citizens. The chapter moves beyond this dualism to consider the motivations, challenges, available resources, and distinct democratic work enacted by citizens in these spaces of bottom-up governance. It also discusses issues of growth and sustainability over time as well as the implications posed for conventional state and civil society institutions. Citizens’ governance spaces offer important lessons – in terms of both potential benefits and risks – for the project of deepening the quality and reach of citizen participation in modern democratic systems.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process that engages citizens in public investment decisions through a mix of deliberation, representation, and voting. This chapter describes how this democratic innovation has been practiced, elaborates its goals, provides an overview of its origins and diffusion, and reviews research on its outcomes for citizen engagement, local governance, and community empowerment. These findings are illustrated by two case studies. Porto Alegre, Brazil, not only represents the birthplace of PB, but also is an example of uniquely pronounced changes in government responsiveness to underserved communities and in the strength of civil society organizations after PB’s implementation. New York City’s program is fairly representative of PB as practiced in the Global North. Controlling a smaller share of city budgets, processes like PBNYC have been more able to replicate Porto Alegre’s model of equitable citizen engagement than to transform urban governance or the organization of local civil society.

The field of youth organizing emerged in the 1990s, as nonprofit organizations began engaging low-income youth of color, aged thirteen to nineteen, in political education and community organizing work while also providing developmental supports, such as academic tutoring and mental health resources. Over the last thirty years, the field has expanded rapidly. This chapter discusses the unique features of youth organizing and identifies trends in the field, including the growth in different kinds of youth organizing groups, the rise of coalitions, and changes in the demographic makeup of participants. It then presents a case description of a long-standing youth organizing group, Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL), based in Oakland, California. Next, the chapter reviews the literature addressing how youth organizing promotes the psychological empowerment of its participants and builds community power situationally, institutionally, and systemically. It concludes by highlighting the implications of this research and suggesting opportunities for future scholarship.

This chapter analyses the institutional architecture and political reforms of the Iberian monarchies from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, underlining two main ideas. First, the persistence of an institutional model based upon jurisdictional autonomies until the end of the seventeenth century. This political framework was based on cooperation and negotiation allowing the participation of the different institutional and social bodies in the political decision-making process. Iberian monarchs and their ministers were able to establish alliances with local oligarchies, important noble houses, guilds and, of course, the Church. This system was partly disrupted by a movement of political reforms that reinforced State interventionism in the economy during the eighteenth century. Second, the limited economic impact of such reforms prevented an economic growth similar to other Western European territories. They faced resistance of the kingdoms and territories, which aimed to preserve their customs and the resistance of the privileged groups who struggle to maintain their properties and fiscal privileges. Both factors detained the attempts of centralizing reforms and undermined the process of increasing state capacity.

This chapter develops an original account of political ethics, which details not only what it means to belong to a political community but also the normative contribution that politics makes to the lives of private individuals. Advancing discrete conceptions of authenticity and reasonableness, it discusses two fundamentally political duties that we owe to those who share our communities with us: duties that partly define our membership within those groups and inform the ethical value of politics as a discrete form of human activity. It also describes two ways in which politics enhances our ethical lives in instrumental terms, articulating a conception of political action that foregrounds its objective value. This argument forms the normative core of 'statehood as political community', the conception of state creation advanced within the first part of the overall text.

This chapter establishes the broader contours of politics, conceived as a discrete domain of ethical behaviour. It begins by detailing some paradigmatic instances of political action, organised into two categories: 'direct' and 'indirect'. Next, it examines the relationship between political action and violence, arguing that although individual violent acts might instantiate ethically valuable politics to some degree, truly endemic violence is inimical to politics. Having established this, it turns to the relationship between politics, equality, and inclusion, arguing that politics takes place primarily within geographically demarcated communities and that, as a result, we are justified in prioritising the participation of our compatriots. Finally, this chapter examines the role played by governance institutions within contemporary states, arguing that they fulfil an essential facilitating function. This grants them 'quasi-independent' value as political 'artefacts', 'focuses', and 'forums'. Taken together, these various arguments bridge the conceptual and normative gap between the analysis of the previous chapter and the account of state creation advanced later in the book.

Building upon the analysis of the previous chapter, this final critical chapter examines theories of state creation focused upon the protection of human rights and the provision of representative government. Both approaches are examined through the lens of governmental legitimacy, and both are finally dismissed as implausible reconstructions of the relevant legal practice. In the course of this argument, significant attention is given to whether the protection of human rights and the provision of representative government are sufficient to render contemporary governments legitimate, to which a negative answer is ultimately given. In particular, neither the egalitarian credentials of representative government nor its facilitation of popular accountability are as normatively conclusive as many 'democratic statehood' theorists suggest.

This chapter demonstrates the political consequences of strong positive and negative partisan identity, including their effect on turnout, vote choice, and various other forms of political participation, among partisans in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Italy.

In this chapter, I offer a thorough review of the scholarship that investigates the impact of partisan identity (i.e., expressive partisanship) on political behavior, including political attitudes, turnout, voting, and other forms of political participation.

Political research has argued that systematic inequalities in political participation are bound to produce a system that caters more to those who actively voice their opinions. Yet it might be that citizens who rarely see their preferences translated to policy are discouraged from participating in politics. In this chapter, we attempt to estimate the extent to which unequal representation affects participation. Using nine survey measures of system satisfaction across twenty-nine European countries, and looking at nine forms of political participation, we decompose gaps in participation and estimate counterfactually how large these gaps would have been if low-educated and poor citizens had the same beliefs about the system as more-educated and affluent citizens. We find that the gap in voting between the bottom and top education/income quintile would be around 15 20 percent smaller if those groups were equally optimistic about the workings of the system. These results suggest that unequal participation is partly attributable to the system being unequally responsive.

Chapter 6 illustrates that household political cooperation begets a system of political organization that centers on men. Using network data from a census survey, it describes the structure of the overall village political network, including gender homophily of political ties, centrality in the entire network, and the average degree of connectivity between individuals and political elites. It shows that village political networks are structured such that men comprise the center of the network, while women remain on the periphery. As a result, influence is concentrated among men, and village politics is structured around men’s other intersecting identities, namely caste. It then compares the size and composition of women’s and men’s political networks and show that women are connected to village politics largely through the men in their household. For men, women do not register as political actors. Household political cooperation thus implies strong limits on women’s access to power, influence, and information and yields a broader gender and political system that perpetuates male dominance.

Chapter 8 demonstrates that such effects can be augmented by stimulating solidarity among women with a focus on gender consciousness-raising, but that such actions generate backlash. It tests the importance of social solidarity in stimulating women’s collective action by exploiting arbitrary variation in the delivery of a gender consciousness-raising program to SHGs. It shows that women are more likely to undertake collective action after identifying shared experiences of deprivation and forming a bond based on their gender identity. This collective action is also more likely to be aimed at women’s strategic interests – their interests rooted in their patriarchal suppression – and therefore garner more resistance from men in the community, including through increased experiences of (public) violence and harassment. It shows that women navigate this resistance through their collective strength and solidarity.