Popular discourse and the ethical deficiency of ‘Third Way’ conceptions of citizenship

Abstract

The article is in three parts. The first explores the connections and commonalities between different empirical investigations relating to popular discourses of citizenship and argues that these are constituted through the complex combination of overlapping discursive moral repertoires. The second part considers the discursive moral repertoires that constitute discourses of citizenship within the politics of the 'Third Way' project -as it is espoused in the British context -and argues that while such discourses accommodate notions of civic duty, moral obligation and enforced obedience, they seldom embrace a solidaristic ethic of responsibility. The third part discusses key findings from a more recent study of popular discourses of dependency, responsibility and rights. The findings suggest that what inhibits the translation of popular understandings of human interdependency into wider support for a form of citizenship based on collective responsibility and universal social rights is the hegemonic prevalence of a peculiarly individualistic conception of responsibility that seems to be consistent with Third Way thinking. _______________________________This article is concerned with the ethical/moral basis upon which social rights of citizenship are construed within popular discourse. By social rights, I am referring to rights to human welfare -encompassing, for the purposes of this article, provision for social security, healthcare, education, housing and other social services. Comparative research conducted over a decade ago in the United States and Britain suggested that while Americans then tended to accord most importance, or to give 'primacy', to civil and political rights, Britons gave primacy to social rights (Conover et al. 1991).However, more recent research suggests that young Britons now think about citizenship more in terms of responsibilities than rights, and are unlikely to regard social rights as unconditional (Lister et al. 2003). How should we understand this? In the intervening period 'Third Way' thinking, first associated with the Clinton era in 1 the United States, has crossed the Atlantic not only to become the orthodoxy of Britain's New Labour government, but to influence aspects of social policy across Western Europe (Bonoli and Powell 2001; Driver and Martell 2002: ch. 4;Surender and Lewis 2004). Central to the Third Way project is a conception of citizenship in which there can be 'no rights without responsibilities' (Giddens 1998: 65; and see Labour Party 1997;Dean 1999).It will be argued that, although the politics of the Third Way can have had only an indirect effect on popular conceptions of citizenship, it none the less represents an important constraint upon the development of social rights. There are two prefatory points that should perhaps be inserted here. First, it is acknowledged that the notion of social rights is in any event ambiguous, and indeed contested (Dean 2002: ch. 1;Powell 2002). While social democratic accounts have championed social rights as a means to ...

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