In recent years, a cottage industry has emerged as scholars have fixated on the seeming erosion of democratic norms and institutions in advanced and developing democracies around the globe. Sara Wallace Goodman’s new book, Citizenship in Hard Times, is a welcomed addition to this growing corpus of scholarship. Goodman explores the attitudinal antecedents of democratic erosion by examining how citizens think about democratic citizenship norms during crises, namely during periods of intense partisan polarization and in instances of foreign election interference.
Goodman’s focus on citizenship norms is rooted in her desire to make ordinary people central actors in determining the stability of democratic institutions during crises. For Goodman, shared citizenship norms are central to fostering a shared political community and for bestowing legitimacy to any political regime. However, by centering citizenship norms in her theory of democratic stability, democratic crises are most acute when people respond to democratic threats not as citizens with shared national goals, but as partisans who place the pursuit of political power above the preservation of democracy. When this occurs, average people no longer serve as a well-spring of political stability; rather, they are a source of instability.
Goodman offers an additional wrinkle, however, by arguing that partisan behavior among citizens is conditional on certain positional incentives, namely whether 1) citizens are members of the incumbent or challenging party and 2) political parties operate within majoritarian or consensus-style electoral systems. On the one hand, Goodman claims incumbents will choose to maintain the political status quo—even if it means ignoring democratic threats—while challengers have a comparatively larger incentive to upend it, especially when democratic threats are present. As a result, Goodman argues that challengers are more likely to embrace citizenship norms in defense of democracy than incumbents. On the other hand, she argues that consensus-style electoral institutions mitigate the zero-sum nature of electoral politics that often fosters political instability and thus will attenuate partisan behavior. To test these positional incentives, Goodman focuses her empirical analysis on three countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. All three countries are broadly similar, but they offer key variation in the positional incentives driving her theory, with the United States reflecting a “majoritarian system par excellence” at one extreme and Germany representing a consensus-style political system at the other (19).
Overall, Goodman offers a soundly argued addition to the growing literature on democratic decline. Her attempt to make ordinary people central actors in the global struggle for democracy is a welcome corrective to narratives that treat the prospect of democratic erosion as a primarily elite-driven phenomenon whereby citizens are merely passive actors. However, it is in this effort to re-center ordinary people around citizenship as the source of democratic legitimacy that her book is both at its strongest, but also opens itself open to some criticism.
Indeed, the book’s most compelling contribution is her multi-dimensional conceptualization and empirical analysis of citizenship norms in chapters 2-4. Goodman conceptualizes citizenship by deftly and convincingly arguing that citizenship goes beyond conventional definitions of citizenship rooted in obligation to the state through behaviors like voting. Instead, citizenship includes behaviors like voting and civic engagement; the endorsement of liberal beliefs related to commitment to the rule of law, political equality, tolerance, and forbearance; and a fundamental sense of belonging to the national community. Goodman uses these three elements to forge a conception of citizenship rooted in social identity.
However, in emphasizing citizenship as a powerful social identity, Goodman risks undermining her effort to re-center her theory of democratic instability around ordinary citizens. Social identity approaches to partisan polarization tend to rely heavily on the power of elite cues in shaping how rank-and-file partisans think about their political world. In this sense, one could ask: Don’t ordinary citizens once again simply become passive actors, not so much legitimizing/challenging the behavior of political elites, but merely regurgitating the messages of their party leaders?
This theoretical critique notwithstanding, perhaps the most intriguing part of Goodman’s empirical analysis was the relative importance people place on each of these elements when thinking about citizenship in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany. For example, Goodman demonstrates in chapter 3 that while the belonging dimension to citizenship stands out as a unique factor in how people think about citizenship in the United Kingdom and (especially) in the United States, it does not factor as prominently in Germany. Why is this the case? Are the results idiosyncratic, or do these loadings capture something meaningful about citizenship norms across these three democracies? Goodman acknowledges the ambiguity in these results, but it seems like an area of fruitful future research.
Similarly, Goodman also reveals fascinating partisan differences in citizenship norms in chapter 4. Even though she acknowledges a strong core of overlapping support for citizenship norms across the ideological spectrum in all three countries, she demonstrates that leftist parties value beliefs like helping others and embracing diversity more than rightist parties, while rightist parties routinely favor allegiant values of belonging more than leftist parties. These insights are consistent with research in moral foundations theory, which suggests that liberals favor individualizing moral foundations and conservatives prefer binding foundations. This suggests that citizenship norms may be just another way to think about social group cohesion. Future research can replicate these findings and ask how citizenship relates to ethnic and civic conceptions of national identity, which can offer a larger window into how racial attitudes might inform people’s citizenship attitudes.
Goodman’s survey experiments in chapters 5 & 6, which attempt to capture change in citizenship norms in the face of democratic crises, are ultimately less compelling than her earlier chapters. Nevertheless, her book is a fantastic and worthwhile read. It forces scholars to recognize that the meaning of citizenship is context contingent, and it means different things to different people.
