In a search for the ‘good European citizen’, the prevalent views of European Union (EU) policymakers, civil society bodies, and citizens are confronted. The civil society and ordinary citizens are both content with strengthening the position of civil society and not increasing the participatory demands on citizens. Ideas among EU policymakers about civil society as a means to integrate citizens and to close the gap between citizens and the EU are misplaced and incongruent with other images of the ‘good European citizen’.

Deliberative forums, such as citizens’ assemblies or reference panels, are one institutionalization of deliberative democracy that has become increasingly commonplace in recent years. MASS LBP is a pioneer in designing and facilitating such long-form deliberative processes in Canada. This article provides an overview of the company’s civic lottery and reference panel process, notes several distinctive features of MASS LBP that are relevant to addressing challenges to democratic deliberation, and outlines possible areas for future research in deliberative democracy applied in both private and public settings.

Most citizens of representative democracies do not take political decisions in their everyday lives. Although participation in periodic elections, political parties, or social movements varies, above all, according to socio-economic status, taking a political decision is, in general, a relatively extraordinary event for the vast majority of citizens. The everyday political experience of these citizens is rather structured by watching and listening to political elites. Unlike the tenor of democratic theory, this quotidian mode of passively following politics is ocular democracy's starting point. So far, the debate on ocular democracy has emphasized its shortcomings as a normative theory. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, this article illustrates the potential of ocular democracy as an analytical tool in the context of intra-party democracy. Podemos’ intra-party procedures are analyzed by complementing an institutional perspective with ocular democracy, thus showing how a party leader inclined to appear particularly venturesome undermines ambitious forms of intra-party democracy.

Immigrant volunteering is a disputed topic. For some scholars, an important instrument for the social integration of immigrants, while others frame immigrant volunteerism as a regime of 'ethical citizenship' centred around the paradigms of 'civic integration' and 'deservingness'. Our research collected the experiences of hundreds of migrant volunteers in Italy (658 questionnaires plus 89 in-depth interviews) to address three research questions in particular: immigrant volunteers' levels of social inclusion, their reasons for volunteering, and the links between volunteering and other forms of social and political participation. Our findings show that volunteering is more dependent on social integration than on social marginality, represents a way to achieve a higher level of social integration, and can be framed as a way to perform active citizenship and anti-xenophobic claims. In particular, volunteering allows immigrant to present themselves as active subjects, oppose demeaning stereotypes, and express political commitment. Ultimately, this substantiates a form of citizenship ‘from below’ that re-writes the script of citizenship and enriches it with new ideas of entitlements and belongings.

Contestation over war memorialization can help democratic theory respond to the current attenuation of citizenship in war in liberal democratic states, especially the United States. As war involves more advanced technologies and fewer soldiers, the relation of citizenship to war changes. In this context war memorialization plays a particular role in refiguring the relation. Current practices of remembering and memorializing war in contemporary neoliberal states respond to a dilemma: the state needs to justify and garner support for continual wars while distancing citizenship from participation. The result is a consumer culture of memorialization that seeks to effect a unity of the political community while it fights wars with few citizens and devalues the public. Neoliberal wars fought with few soldiers and an economic logic reveals the vulnerability to otherness that leads to more active and critical democratic citizenship.

Teaching within Higher Education has traditionally been seen as a vital part of the professional apprenticeship of Politics postgraduates. Changes in UK Higher Education in the past twenty years have seen the numbers of postgraduates accepting some teaching duties while writing a Ph.D. grow. This article draws on the experience of the author and some of his Ph.D. colleagues to consider the challenges and benefits of teaching, and the status of postgraduates as educators.

Friendship societies are a specific type of voluntary associations that aim primarily to support a definable public benefit purpose—either an activity or a public or nonprofit entity. Over the past 20 years, these organizations have been mushrooming in Germany and elsewhere. More than 75,000 friendship societies are currently registered in Germany alone, and meanwhile they account for the majority of newly established associations. However, the general public typically perceives them as unreliable substitutes for the overburdened state. To assess whether these organizations can actually be reduced to this substitution function, the article draws on qualitative interviews with 70 chairpersons from various friendship societies in a German municipality. The study shows that friendship societies do much more than merely assuming responsibility for public benefit purposes and suggests focusing further research on the participatory potential of these associations.

This article combines the fields of deliberative theory and citizenship studies. Drawing from a deliberative experiment on foreigner political rights with almost 300 German citizens, we find that a short virtual deliberative treatment produced a clarification effect, whereby especially those with already negative views increased their scepticism. Participants in our deliberative treatment displayed higher levels of argument repertoire and integrative complexity, underlining that the treatment led to well‐considered opinions. A qualitative analysis of participants’ substantive rationales unravels traces of what De Schutter and Ypi dub ‘mandatory citizenship’, implying that political rights must be attached to obligations. These results have wide ranging implications: They indicate that the practice of deliberation is not quasi‐automatically programmed to progressive outcomes (as some have argued) but can have a communitarian dimension (where preferences are determined on the basis of existing communal values and self‐understandings); this suggests that participatory practices may not always advance progressive reforms.

Participation in Civil Society Organizations (CSO) draws on and enriches social, cultural, and human capital. Social impacts of such participation as active citizenship are systemic and ‘ripple’ far beyond the immediate program outputs and outcomes. CSOs and the third sector as a whole must demonstrate and gage the difference they make in the social life of the broader community. This research offers a new approach to conceptualize CSO social impacts through an empirically derived model that accounts for the impacts of active citizenship for individuals, organizations, and the broader community. A conceptual model of systemic social impact is presented as it was developed through an exploratory study of a large Australian CSO using an abductive methodology combining focus groups and a survey. Considering the potential of the model that could account for impacts beyond program outputs and outcomes, we propose several propositions for future testing the conceptual model.

Fiji’s multi-ethnic society is historically characterised by low levels of inter-ethnic trust and a segregated civil society, typified by low participation of youth, the poor, ethnic minorities, and less literate members of society. How does this actually existing civil society shape the social transactions, value subjectivities, norms and habits of citizenship bred through volunteering and other forms of civic engagement in these contexts? Drawing on data from a mixed method study on youth volunteering in Fiji, this paper interrogates prevailing normative assumptions on volunteerism’s role in retooling civic renewal and citizenship. Being socially situated, the outcomes of youth volunteering vary. Specifically, youth volunteering in organisations that value inclusion has midwifed progressive citizenship values; while, participation in bonding type civil society reproduces exclusionary citizenship, social disparities and patterns of discrimination and privilege. The implication is that for volunteerism to produce desired progressive citizenship values and attitudes, civic organisations transmitting such values need to be specifically focussed on progressive goals.

The article deals with Mohandas K. Gandhi's theory of democracy and its related civic practices. It indicates the relation between Gandhi's idea of civic duty and his idea of democracy, and argues that few would dispute that Gandhi was one of the most original and transformative thinkers of democracy. The article maintains that among his many notable contributions, Gandhi is rightly credited with emphasizing on the ideas of citizenship duty, truth in politics, genuine self-rule, and ethically enlightened democracy. In addition to advocating self-sustaining villages and communal cooperation, Gandhi developed an idea of non-liberal democracy reducing individualism, economic greed, and laissez-faire by insisting on a duty oriented and spiritually empowered participative democracy. Nearly seven decades after his death, Gandhi stands as one of the most significant and relevant non-Western theorist of democracy.

The concept of citizenship is used both as a synonym of social action when referencing to an active form of citizenship as well as to indicate a form of civic obligation (formal citizenship). According to these premises, citizenship can be formalized in a large number of activities that contribute to building it in different ways. The aim of the present work is to explore how the concepts of citizenship and being a citizen are co-built by Italian young adults. Two groups of young adults are considered (engaged vs. not engaged). Eighty-nine young adults participants aged 18–36 completed a self-administered mixed-method questionnaire. A content and thematic analysis was conducted and a composite representation of citizenship emerged. Results of the present work can clarify the concept of citizenship by exploring how it is cognitively and socially represented in young adults and how this representation changes in engaged and not engaged young adults.

This paper describes how the Brazilian Landless Movement fostered an insurgent citizenship among the poor. We describe three core organizational practices of this movement that supported this insurgent citizenship. We find that these practices bear striking resemblance to the practices of other civil society organizations (CSOs), including social service organizations, when they support the empowerment of marginalized communities. The identification of common practices suggests that despite the differences among CSOs, these distinctions may be less stark than assumed and that there may be common causal pathways between CSOs and insurgent citizenship.

In the United Kingdom, the “New Labour” administration that came to power in 1997 has promoted two models of partnership between the state and the voluntary sector. The civic engagement model is based on the renewed interest among governments in the potential of voluntary organizations to contribute to the civic engagement of citizens. In the service delivery model, voluntary organizations are recruited to the task of delivering core social services. Drawing on data from disability-related voluntary organizations in Northern Ireland, this paper illustrates the impact of the service delivery partnership model on the development of voluntary action in the welfare field, and the relative paucity of resources allocated to participatory voluntary action and civic engagement. The consequent impact on the development of partnerships between the state and the voluntary sector is discussed.

The electoral franchise has become more universal as restrictions based on criteria such as sex or property have been lifted throughout the process of democratisation. Yet, a broad range of exclusions has persisted to this date, making the suffrage non-universal, even in established democracies. In this article, we present ELECLAW, a new set of indicators that captures the subtle and variegated legal landscape of persisting electoral rights restrictions. We measure the inclusiveness of the right to vote and the right to stand as candidate across four levels and three types of elections for three categories of voters: citizen residents, non-citizen residents, and non-resident citizens. ELECLAW currently covers fifty-one democracies in three different continents (the Americas, Europe, and Oceania) depicting the legal situation in 2015. The article introduces the methodology used for building the indicators so as to make it transparent to the broader research community. To this aim, it successively unpacks the conceptualisation underlying the indicators, explains the measurement by providing specific examples, and discusses the merits of a differentiated and context-driven method of aggregation.

This essay aims to review the contemporary debate on citizenship with a focus on the present dilemma of the institution of citizenship between equality and difference. Citizenship today seems to have become stuck between a categorical commitment to either universalism or particularism. It is as if there is no alternative but to opt for either assimilation (national citizenship) or group fetishism (the end of citizenship). In this essay, however, I argue that citizenship today is not as helpless as it looks. I suggest that rethinking the categories of equality and universality may save modern citizenship from this dilemma between equality and difference. Perceiving equality as equality of differences and not homogenisation and pursuing a contingent notion of universality may, I argue, be of some use in coping with the dilemma in question.

Although it has gained wide currency in the analysis of African politics, civil society remains a “mysterious” concept in need of proper grounding and understanding as an integral part of African social formation. This paper argues that one of the widely acclaimed canonical works in African studies, Peter Ekeh’s theory of colonialism and the two publics in Africa provides one of the most original perspectives for locating and understanding the character of modern civil society as a product of colonialism. In particular, the theory provides an explanation for why primordial attachments have remained fundamental to the structuration of civil society and why state–civil society relations have largely been fractured, instrumentalist, and dialectical in the post-colonial period.

This paper serves to explore the concept of the European Muslims, the facts and challenges, from the perspective of a European Muslim. I aim to highlight some of the deep-routed issues that European Muslims have faced historically and continue to experience today. I consider the causes and rationale behind the current situation and look beyond to suggest ways in which this may evolve. Four contributory factors have led to the deepening multidimensional identity crisis of Western society – globalisation, immigration, the emergence of a new kind of citizen and social and terrorist violence. These have lead to the creation of physiological and emotional tensions, doubts and fears in both Muslims and people of other faiths. Similar questioning is also evident within Muslim-majority countries. I propose suggestions for how improvements might be achieved, for better coherency and understanding to enable us to evolve from this feeling of fear and doubt towards self-confidence and mutual trust through a long-term dialectical approach. I highlight the importance of long-term education to overcome the lack of knowledge of one another and the associated confusion that exists today. Official institutions and politicians also have an important role to play in the development of civic awareness and a common goal to consider a vision for more meaningful communication. There is a need to create and build upon sound foundations of respect for both the values of individuals and those of religious communities throughout Europe; a need to invite an in-depth, deliberate analysis of relevant dialogue between one another. Critical reflection and analysis of the fundamentals of all faiths are essential to help us to recognise the role of the spirituality and its importance to the individual, and for us to recognise the benefits and richness that the embracement of the plurality of our faiths can provide. I argue that effective public dissemination of accurate information is also necessary, looking at the influence of the media and the need for journalists to consider making more responsible, positive contributions – to be bold and to challenge but to be prepared to ask appropriate questions and distribute findings responsibly. This will in turn seek to encourage individual choice and responsibility of the ordinary citizen – enabling and encouraging us to listen to our neighbours, to take time to better understand one another wholly, without judgement and preconceptions and to identify how we can best cooperate – each of us actively participating and positively contributing towards our more all-inclusive societies.

As they deliver services, organizations have to deal with conflicts over competing and sometimes irreconcilable values, especially at a time when they are facing competitive pressure and diminishing resources. The civicness of organizations expresses itself in how they enable positive interaction over such conflicts between their members. This paper focuses specifically on the relationship between professionals and their managers. By infusing social behaviour with civil values, organizations can contribute to a wider culture of citizenship.

This study argues that different cities in China have different resource environments available for NGOs. Organizations react to these resource environments by constructing appropriate resource strategies, which in turn shape the characteristics and structures of the NGOs of that city. It further examines how these characteristics and structures influence the construction and performance of citizenship in an authoritarian environment. Specifically, some types of NGOs encourage Chinese citizens to be passive, while others offer a model for people to actively engage with social issues. This is aptly demonstrated in an analysis of NGOs operating across four cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming, and Nanjing—which reveals three different types of resource environments and behavioral models for NGOs. We subsequently discuss the implications of each model for citizen engagement.