Citizenship
Citizenship is the status of being a legally recognized member of a nation-state or other political community, possessing rights such as voting and owing duties such as jury service. In democratic thought, citizens generally are expected to be more actively involved and influential than citizens of authoritarian political systems. By joining environmental organizations, writing letters to government officials, working as volunteers, and otherwise affecting civic life, millions of citizens have helped bring about improvements in environmental policy, AIDS-HIV treatment, civilian nuclear power, genetically modified foods, and other technological endeavors.
In the city-state of ancient Athens, members of the demos participated directly in public debates and governmental choices, a time-consuming responsibility and honor—but only for the minority of the adult population who were not females, slaves, or otherwise excluded. When democracy was reinvented on the scale of the nation-state in Western Europe and the United States, citizenship extended only to property-owning males. Although such legal constraints have been abolished, the affluent and well educated continue to participate at higher rates, donate more money to candidates, and speak and write more persuasively. Women are underrepresented in political life due to the legacy of being hindered in "their access to full citizenship (including their capacity to speak and write freely, to acquire education, or to run for political office)" (Kessler-Harris 2001, p. 3–4). Ethnic minorities are disadvantaged almost everywhere.
New Citizenship Problematics
Challenges for citizenship now arise from globalization and the erosion of national sovereignty. The governmental unit one should identify with—the city of Paris, the nation of France, the European Union, or humanity most generally—is no longer clear (Balibar 2004). Because technological innovation emerges primarily in the affluent nations, moreover, those who reside elsewhere—a majority of humanity—in some respects are not citizens of the technological world order. Transnational citizenship seems increasingly sensible, therefore, yet institutions for it are weak.
Citizenship also becomes less salient when technological choices occur via the economy more than via government. Business executives exercise primary discretion over job creation, quality of work life, and new technological products, and computerized transactions in a few financial centers such as London affect monetary matters worldwide (Dean 2003). The privileged position of business extends to ordinary politics, where industry executives marshal unrivaled expertise, enjoy easy access to public officials, and have ample funds for lobbying and for legal challenges to government regulations (Lindblom and Woodhouse 1993).
In contrast, most adults work in semiauthoritarian organizations and exert little influence over whether technological innovations are used to make jobs more interesting, or to displace and down-skill those affected. Workers may learn a more general lesson: Don't expect to be full citizens whose opinions are valued and influential. Industrial democracy in the former Yugoslavia, codetermination laws in Scandinavia, and other experiments in economic democracy have not been widely emulated (Dahl 1985).
To the extent that ordinary people do participate in economic-technological choices, it is via consumer purchasing or market voting. Thus new homes in the United States grew from 800 to 2,300 square feet from 1950 to 2000, affecting energy usage, environmental despoliation, and even the level of envy. Consumer-citizens catalyzed global proliferation of a high-consumption lifestyle including air conditioning, television, and leisure travel—thereby distributing endocrine-disrupting chemicals throughout the biosphere, causing the extinction of several thousand languages and traditional cultures, endangering myriad species, and increasing rates of psychological depression.
The Challenge of Technoscientific Expertise
Another difficulty confronting citizenship is that technical knowledge increasingly required for informed discussion. When a U.S. congressional committee considered tax credits to help professional cleaners switch away from the dangerous solvent perchloroethylene in 1999, not a single citizen or public interest group wrote, phoned, or visited: Hardly anyone understood the problem of toxic air pollution from professional cleaning. Technologists do not themselves control governments, but expertise complexifies and effectively restricts participation in governance (Laird 1993).
A subtle way this occurs is that technoscientists accelerate innovation to a pace that government regulators, interest groups, and the attentive public cannot match. Roboticists, developers of esoteric weapons, biomedical researchers, nanotechnologists, and others ride a juggernaut fundamentally altering everyday life worldwide. If representative processes do not apply to technologists—most of whom are upper-middle-class males from the European Union, Japan, and the United States—and if there is insufficient time for deliberation, what meaning does citizenship have?
For all the shortcomings of traditional democratic procedures, that realm at least has competing parties, electoral campaigns, interest groups, and other forms of public inquiry, advocacy, deliberation, and dissent. Consumer-citizens enjoy none of these advantages—for example, shoppers rarely hear informed, conflicting views about environmental and other public consequences of products they purchase. Should citizenship be extended to the technological-economic sphere? To do so might require a set of citizen rights and obligations to "reconcile democracy ... with the right of innovators to innovate ... (and) to reconcile technology's unlimited potentials for human benefit and ennoblement with its unlimited potentials for human injury, tyrannization, and degradation" (Frankenfeld 1992, p. 462). Citizens arguably deserve relevant information, informed consent, and a limit on endangerment; and they presumably should embrace a corresponding duty to learn enough to exercise informed judgment.
In the early twenty-first century, technoscientists often proceed without obtaining informed consent, publics are mostly quiescent, and decision-making processes are not designed for timely deliberation. Extensive political research and development would be required to develop new mechanisms for holding technoscientific-economic representatives accountable, while organizing intermediary institutions to assist citizens in gaining requisite knowledge and shouldering other burdens of responsible participation.
There are a few encouraging signs: Some European political parties now require that women occupy 50 percent of elected offices, international norms and governance mechanisms may be emerging, and small-scale experiments with consensus conferences and other participatory innovations are gaining credibility. Nevertheless no innovation without representation is a long way from becoming the twenty-first-century equivalent of American colonists' cries against taxation without representation; there are formidable obstacles to an ethically defensible citizenship for wisely governing technoscientific trajectories and for fairly distributing rights and duties in a technological civilization.
Civil Society;; Consensus Conferences;; Democracy;; Expertise.
Bibliography
Balibar, Etienne. (2004). We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Beiner, Ronald, ed. (1994). Theorizing Citizenship. Albany: State University of New York Press. Widely cited text that nevertheless fails to theorize the problems that science and technology pose for citizenship.
Dahl, Robert A. (1985). A Preface to Economic Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dean, Kathryn. (2003). Capitalism and Citizenship: The Impossible Partnership. New York: Routledge.
Frankenfeld, Phillip J. (1992). "Technological Citizenship: A Normative Framework for Risk Studies." Science, Technology, & Human Values 17: 459–484.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. (2001). In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Laird, Frank N. (1990). "Technocracy Revisited." Industrial Crisis Quarterly 4: 49–61.
Lindblom, Charles E., and Edward J. Woodhouse. (1993). The Policy-Making Process, 3rd edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Lister, Ruth. (2003). Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, 2nd edition. New York: New York University Press. Analyzes gender and citizenship in terms going beyond women's participation.
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