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Active citizenship and participatory democracy

Late modern political consciousness has changed our understanding of

what it means to be a citizen. Various strands within late modern political

life, such as feminism and queer theory, have challenged the precepts of lib-

eralism and social democracy by arguing that the ‘personal is political’. The

private spaces of social life, first opened to public scrutiny by pioneer social

activists in the Victorian era, have become the battleground of cultural poli-

tics. Radical democrats espousing participation through the fragmented

causes of identity politics have been joined by neo-conservatives in challen-

ging the hegemonic influences of liberalism, social democracy and the

nation-state. The great meta-narratives of the pursuit of human emancipa-

tion through social politics and pluralism through diversity and individual

choice have lost their persuasive force in late modern discourse. The politics

of late modernity has reshaped political discourse into interplay between

human subjectivities ( political consciousness) and the state. This reflexive

process is continuously reinventing political issues into new forms, new

debates and new subjectivities. Late modern consciousness has trans-

formed established meanings and relationships between the family, civil

society and the state into an anti-bureaucratic and anti-clientist form,

based on the democratic value of the citizens’ rights to participate. These

opposed views of late modernity mean transforming civil society into an

ideological battlefield between neoliberalism and an emergent social left

(Powell, 2007).

Active citizenship has emerged in this transformed social landscape. It

was initially promoted by neoliberals ‘as an exhortation to discharge the

responsibilities of neighbourliness, voluntary action and charity’ in the

context of ‘the rundown of public sector services, benefit cutbacks and pri-

vatised programme in which it was advanced’ (Lister, 1997, p. 22).

However, more radical democratic variants of active citizenship emerged

in the form of community groups challenging paternalistic top-down

relationships that disempower. These more democratic forms of active

citizenship arguably indicate the emergence of new social movements

among marginalized groups. Active citizenship here is associated with

demands for greater participation in the welfare state through the involve-

ment of the burgeoning third sector as a partner. In this reality, the third

sector is perceived as an alternative to state bureaucracy and professional

elitism, and a public space between government and market. Civil society

in its re-invigorated form is presented as a democratic community-based

alternative to the dependent status imposed by the social citizenship of

the welfare state.

In postmodern conditions, active citizenship in the form of volunteering

is promoted as a more humane alternative to the Fordist philosophy of the

welfare state ‘one size fits all’. It is part of a wider attack on the modernist

conception of citizenship that has in part been induced by the consumerist

philosophy of neoliberalism but is also the product of a deeper social frag-

mentation connected to the rise of identity politics. Social politics, embo-

died in the institution of the welfare state, has consequently suffered in

terms of public esteem. The growing disenchantment with this form of

democracy and demands for greater public participation refocus attention

away from the social to the active citizen. The core emphasis in active

citizenship is on participation in the decision-making and service delivery

processes of state, leading to the empowerment of the citizen. Active

citizenship can be innovative (e.g. campaign for migrant workers’ rights);

preservationist ( protecting the environment) or remedial (helping the

dispossessed) (Uprimmy and Garcia-Villegas, 2006, p. 84). Boaventura

de Sousa Santos views the reconciliation of the confrontation between

representative democracy and participatory democracy based on active

citizenship as the core challenge for late modern society. In his book

Democratizing Democracy, de Sousa Santos (2006, p. x) declares:

Such a confrontation, which derives from the fact that representative

democracy has systematically denied the legitimacy of participatory

democracy, will be resolved only to the extent to which such denial is

replaced by the development of forms of complementarity between the

two forms of democracy that may contribute to deepen one another. Such

complimentarity paves one of the ways to the reinvention of social

emancipation.

In the reconstructed reality of late modern society, the challenge facing the

agora is to respond reflexively to changing needs and demands. The chal-

lenge to the zeitgeist of the welfare state social obligation, common citizen-

ship and human rights is manifest. If cultural agendas in the shape of

identity politics and burgeoning social movements are to be the shape of

things to come, where does that leave active citizenship? Is it possible to

sustain communities in a polarized and fragmented social order? This is the

great social, political and intellectual challenge of our times.