Models of Citizenship

Returning to our original question about what lessons news for young adults teaches about citizenship, we will need to expand our idea of citizenship considerably.

As we mentioned earlier, when the Center for Civic Education in the early 1990s launched its national CIVITAS curriculum committed to “fostering the development of informed, responsible participation in civic life by citizens committed to values and principles fundamental to American constitutional democracy,” one could argue that it tended to shut down wider debates about the meanings both of democracy and citizenship by promoting a mythic idea of consensus around these two terms. In fact, when the American Political Science Association turned it attention to assessing national civic standards in a special 1997 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics, this is exactly what they found. (18)

Shelia Mann, in introducing the issue, gave us a clue as to where the libertarian government of the elder George Bush sat on the issue of active citizenship in 1991. (19) At that time, with concerns over youth political apathy growing, Bush announced an ambitious goal to set national educational standards in five areas. Civics and government were not on the list.

In response to this omission, teachers’ organizations and civic associations lobbied the Department of Education and the Pew Charitable Trusts to take up the issue of civic education. The result was the grant award that made the development of the Center for Civic Education's CIVITAS curriculum possible.

In the same issue, Richard Merelman reviewed the goals of the CIVITAS curriculum which was published in 1994 in light of what he called four models of citizenship. (20)

The first model he called the hegemonic model of civics education, which is a form of socialization to existing government and political values where the primary goal is to reinforce the rule of existing elites. A second model, which he labels the critical model of civics, is committed to communicating the realities of political power, developing an understanding of “the existence of conflict, the importance of self-interest, the failures of public policies and political institutions to achieve given political objectives, and the inequalities in the distribution of political power.”

The third model Merelman labels the transformative model of civics education. It combines elements of the critical and hegemonic models stressing, and here he quotes the work of Charles Merriam, a “struggle … in the development of civic training..: between the older system of traditional indoctrination, and one in which much greater stress is laid upon the element of invention, adaptability, and adjustment in a changing world.”

Finally, he outlines a fourth model which he argues recognizes that any model of civics education may be more influential on educational policymakers than students. In this sense it is a “ritual of political nostalgia, creating for policymakers the illusion that genuine progress in political education has at long last begun.” Merelman labels this the symbolic model of civic education, attuned to reassuring political elites that “’something is being done’ to meet the ‘crisis’ of citizenship.”

Armed with these four models Merelman returns to the Center for Civic Education’s CIVITAS curriculum and finds national civics standards which “emphasize shared political values over political participation; oversimplify the relationships between American political values; assert a highly contestable function (cohesion) for shared values; and rely mainly upon elite statements to identify these political values.”

Initially Merelman finds in the CIVITAS curriculum fits most closely with the hegemonic model of civics education. His analysis finds that:

… it is the powerful who would benefit most from the paucity of criticism and political participation which the proposed standards encourage; from the rhetorical silences about the actual extent of value sharing, the assumed consistency of values, and the cohesive function of shared values; from the heavy reliance on seminal public documents to define values; and from the implicit exclusion of those who do not espouse these values from being, in some sense, ‘American.’

Merelman finds this tone well illustrated in its handling of the concept of “diversity.” First, it is never defined. Second, students are expected to be able to “explain the importance of adhering to constitutional values and principles in managing conflicts over diversity,” indicating that diversity is represented as being primarily about conflict and that when diversity gets in the way,it must yield to the timeless values of the constitution.

Merelman also recognizes that the CIVITAS standards do not entirely exclude the critical model of civics. Criticism is simply downplayed or understood as taking place within a normative position.

Ultimately Merelman concludes that beyond the hegemonic specifics of the proposed standards and their ambivalent attention to critique, the overall commitment to providing the necessary resources to implement them either in federal funding or in classroom time are substantially lacking. This leads to his final conclusion that in the end, this most recent national flurry of concern over citizenship will serve primarily a symbolic function—serving mainly as “a symbolic ritual masked as an educational policy for reinforcing cultural hegemony.”

For our purposes the review by the American Political Science Association of the CIVITAS standards and curriculum makes clear, at the general level, that if we are going to examine the job of kids’ news in teaching the lessons of citizenship, we will need to carefully locate our notion of citizenship within the larger debates over the meaning and process of various models of democracy. At a more specific level it provides some insights into how we might begin to organize our understanding of the various ways citizenship could be conceptualized, and tips us off to the likely linkage we will find between the neo-liberal model of democracy and a legalistic definition of citizenship contained within the CIVITAS program.

At this point we can lay out three models of citizenship that are informed by our three models of democracy.

Liberal/Legalistic Model of Citizenship

Citizenship in this model is defined as legally recognized membership in a self-governing community. The National Standards for Civics and Government, for example, defines a citizen as “a member of a political society who therefore owes allegiance to and is entitled to protection by and from the government.”

According to the legalistic model:

  1. Citizens are endowed with fundamental rights and privileges including:
    • personal rights (the right to privacy, the right to freedom of conscience, the right to freedom of expression and association);
    • political rights (freedom of speech, press, assembly, petition; the right to vote and run for public office);
    • and economic rights (property rights, the right to choose one's work, the right to join a labor union)
  2. At the same time, citizenship carries certain individual responsibilities such as: supporting one’s family, accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions, and behaving in a civil manner.
  3. And it implies certain civic responsibilities, including obeying the law, paying taxes, voting, serving on juries, or serving in the armed forces.

According to this model of citizenship, informed and effective citizen participation is essential to the well-being of American constitutional democracy. To have a voice in the political process, citizens must become active participants. Elections, campaigns, and voting are considered to be the center of public life under this model, although proponents acknowledge a wide range of other participatory opportunities, including “attending political meetings, contacting public officials, joining advocacy groups and political parties, and taking part in demonstrations.” (21)

This model clearly stresses its deep commitment to individualism and to the division between the public and private spheres. Less obvious but made clear elsewhere at the Center for Civic Education, is the deep, positive value assigned to the free-market and market relations. Margaret Branson, associate director of the Center has given substantial agreement in her articles and talks with the work of libertarian Milton Friedman. (22) Branson, recognizing Robert Dahl as the "leading American democratic theorist" even goes so far as to attempt to position Dahl as a friend of free-market liberalism. This is quite a stretch of the imagination in reframing Dahl who has written that the greatest threat to democracy today derives from the "liberty to accumulate unlimited economic resources and to organize economic activity into hierarchically governed enterprises." (23)

Radical Communitarianism Model of Citizenship

Barber constructs his model of Communitarian Democracy descriptively, attempting to call attention to a number of growing trends in U.S. society where individuals buffeted by increasingly invasive market forces and a growing disenchantment with government attempt to find new grounds for individual and social identity. But even as Barber sympathizes with the frustrations Communitarians attempt to address, he is deeply concerned with their willingness to both abandon civic life as anything more than the condition under which community bonds based on traditional family, religious, and ethnic identities are able to come into being. Barber fears the potential for these “tribal” identities to contribute to a conservative or even reactionary politics of submission and exclusion.

In the Communitarian model (24)

  1. The citizen must guard against a government that expresses no unified moral commitment.
  2. Acts of citizenship themselves are oriented toward the preservation of the unified moral values of the community—values which for the most part are not up for discussion or debate, that stand outside of civil or democratic culture. Calls for, in effect, a new theocracy.
  3. Civil society itself is redefined away from public, democratic life toward communal, moralistic life.
  4. Solidarity tends to depend on obedience to a hierarchy of govenrment that rules primarily by moral absolutism than by democratic process.
  5. The self is not only defined by the group, but one is encouraged to obliterate the sense of self in the name of the group.
  6. There is a celebration of mystical belonging and difference in all forms is viewed as threatening.
  7. Community, narrowly conceived, is held as the bulwark against the growing anarchy of the social and economic world.
  8. The citizen must challenge free-market values which obsessively promote individualism and the selfish fulfillment of short-term individual desire which are seen as active and direct threats to common identity and collective membership.
  9. A deep line must be drawn between the idea of consumer and citizen.

One key inspiration in mapping the conditions of Radical Communitarianism comes from Barber's consideration of the German ideal of Volksgemeinschaft which arose in the 1920s as a counterpoint to the Weimar Republic's liberalism. (25) The identity of bloodline as the ultimate source of citizenship came to overtake any other conception of political life and provided the hypernationalistic grounding for Nazism. Another key inspiration is his consideration of the surge of new tribalism in the last decade, a movement we mentioned earlier, which he labels “Jihadism,” and within which he examines the recent events in places like Iraq. (26) These are places where “Virulently negative expressions of communitarian solidarity are in fact often reactions to the market's desocializing features. The thinner the market’s social nexus, the thicker and more bloody the response to it.” (27)

Participatory Democracy Model of Citizenship

The virtues of citizenship in the Participatory Democracy model are in many ways easy to anticipate, simply because in this model the citizen and the life of citizenship are fundamental to both the definition and practice of democracy.
We should also note that while the idea of citizenship we outlined under the Liberal/Legalistic Model of Democracy is well illustrated by the well-endowed Center for Civic Education, illustrations of the Participatory Democracy model of citizenship must be gathered from a number of different movements and organizations.

Ironically, at least in terms of Barber’s classification scheme, one of the most important organizations is the Civics Practice Network which has strong ties with a number of communitarian organizations and in fact is sometimes referred to as communitarian. (28)

However, as we mentioned earlier, Barber’s characterization of communitarianism is an exaggerated sketch of some of its most potentially destructive features. At the same time, as Barber himself has acknowledged, aspects of what might be called “democratic” communitarianism, share a fundamental agreement with the idea of “strong” or participatory democracy. In fact, if one reads the Civic Practices Network’s call for a “new citizenship,” one will find a characterization of both democracy and citizenship very much in keeping with the position we have associated here with Barber. (29) At its heart is a reinvention of a civil life which stands between government and the market and which is not just a tool to achieve other goals, but serves as an ever changing end in itself.

The idea of citizenship that we outline below also borrows from the Amercian Political Science Association’s Civic Education Network, (30) the Walt Whitman Center at Rutgers University which Barber directs, and the work of Harry Boyte, who co-directs the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota based within the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. (31)

This model defines citizens as members of a community, broadly conceived. While citizenship in this model addresses one’s rights as a community member, the emphasis is placed on a citizen’s responsibilities. These responsibilities stem from the primary goal of meeting social needs. In order to meet society’s needs, critical citizens show a concern for public control over the powerful, and focus on inequalities in the distribution of political power. They analyze political conflict and critique the failure of public policies and political institutions to achieve their objectives. (32)

The principles of the Participatory Democracy Model of Citizenship include:

  1. The cohesion of human rights and democratic responsibilities.
  2. The respect and celebration of multiculturalism/diversity.3. The development of cultural consciousness and competence and the participatory basis of collective identity and community formation.
  3. Participation in this model includes engaging in the formal political process, but focuses on multiple types of participation and the critical reflection on that participation. Examples of other forms of participation include community service, protest/demonstration, volunteer service, community work.

The participatory citizen demonstrates that s/he views citizenship as a complex process and understands citizenship relationships—for example, the relationship between diversity and politics. The participatory citizen appreciates the interconnectedness of self, community, and world, and understands multiple belongings to these various groups. Citizens in this model also show empathy and solidarity with struggles outside their own.

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