Citizenship from below: exploring subjective perspectives on German citizenship

Abstract

Citizenship is a contested and multifaceted concept. This article introduces a research design to explore individual perspectives on citizenship in Germany. Its emphasis is on capturing broad perspectives on citizenship in a wide array of variations and terms. To achieve this, the article proceeds in two steps: First, a concourse on citizenship is constructed. To populate the concourse, I draw on citizenship theory and the German-speaking Twitter discourse on citizenship. Second, that concourse is used for a further, systematic empirical investigation of perspectives on citizenship in Germany. Results from an online Q-methodological survey with 294 German citizens from autumn 2020 are presented. Four factors emerge from the Q-survey: critical ethno-culturalists, active democrats, liberal democrats, and cosmopolitans. While all associate different concepts of belonging, participation, and equality with citizenship, all four conceptualizations share the view that citizenship is more than a status and connect it to obligation. Obligation takes different forms, namely common tradition, political participation, liberal institutions, and humanist connection. The article combines the most distinctive conflict lines in citizenship studies by drawing on both theoretical and empirical approaches. It thereby contributes a novel methodology and relevant deeper insight into the complexities of citizenship.

Reflecting on the boundaries of the demos: A virtual deliberative experiment with German citizens

“…9 Our deliberative experiment also relies heavily on the arguments presented to participants within our design. Notice that these are based on a concourse on citizenship and are reflective of arguments voiced by citizens in the real world (Maier, 2021).…”

Technological Citizenship in Times of Digitization: An Integrative Framework

“…At the same time, there is no single authoritative definition of citizenship. The concept of 'citizenship' possesses the characteristics of an essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1955;Maier, 2021;Menéndez & Olsen, 2020). In fact, the concept 'citizenship' is among the most contentious concepts in theory of law and political theory (Orgad & Reijers, 2020).…”

The Doctors of Democracy: Self-Image and Democratic Values of Participatory Practitioners

“…The final Q-sample, later sorted by the participants, arises from the concourse (from the Latin concursus, meaning ' a running together', as when ideas condense in a thought) (Brown 1993). The concourse can be understood as the full set of possible opinions, attitudes and meanings attached to certain subject or as Maier (2021: 2) puts it: ' a universe of statements that captures different aspects and understandings of an issue.' The main goal is to extract a well-rounded set of items out of the concourse which provides a fair representation of dimensions studied (Stephen 1985).…”