Ordinary Citizenship

We often ask what makes a good citizen, but we rarely ask what makes an ordinary citizen. The ordinary citizens are the 'not-so-good' citizens, citizens for whom politics and political participation are not objects of great enthusiasm. We often disparage them: we regret their ignorance of current affairs, their apathy, their selfishness; and we lament the wider civic decline they are seen to embody. We also try to 'repair' them by making them into better citizens: better informed, more likely to vote and volunteer, more polite and public-spirited. A 2018 UK government report identified as a core challenge the need to promote a society 'whose members are encouraged and enabled to participate as active citizens' (Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement).

But we do all of this without thinking carefully about what ordinary citizenship is and what role it plays in a democracy - we think of ordinary citizens only in terms of what they lack and of how we might improve them. This oversight is not just a matter of theoretical interest: the stigmatisation of ordinary citizens has been exploited by populist political movements which have fostered social division by strategically and often cynically positioning themselves as defenders of the ordinary people against a more politically savvy elite. The central aim of this project is to counter those tendencies and to create and sustain a healthier democracy by showing that ordinary citizenship plays a vital role in political life. The project will ask what it really means to be an ordinary citizen and will propose a re-evaluation of those who fall short of our civic ideals. Instead of denigrating them, we should seek to accommodate them, whilst learning how to foster the distinctive qualities and dispositions their role demands.

To achieve these goals, we need to understand better how ordinary citizens understand themselves. And this requires a somewhat unusual approach that departs from the often abstract methods of conventional political philosophy. By working on the ground with local democracy activists and ordinary citizens themselves, and by combining those activities with an extensive interdisciplinary study of everyday citizenship, the project will develop a rich account of the situated experience of ordinary citizens. That account will then inform the conceptual and normative enquiry that lies at the project's centre.

Working closely with practitioners, the project will inspire new approaches to understanding and cultivating citizenship beyond formal democratic institutions. It will achieve this through a sequence of knowledge exchange activities aimed at the development of a smartphone app to evaluate the civic engagement of users generating a 'citizen score' and associated ranking. By working, first, with citizens themselves, and subsequently with an on-line learning platform (project partner, Hive Learning) and civil society organisations like Notwestminster and Democratic Society, activities will explore the ethical and technical shortcomings of the enterprise. In so doing, the project will generate fresh insights about what it means to be a citizen and about the possibilities and limitations of technology in the service of local democracy.