Citizenship beyond voting: a call to engage
This is a lightly edited excerpt from my book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us. I’m publishing it on the week of the UK General Election as a call to arms — or rather, a call to engage. The arrival of a new government will create a space for hope in this country that has been painfully missing. It is a necessary change, but not sufficient.
First, a definition.
Citizens, as I understand the term, are humans who want to shape the world around them for the better, and who claim and where necessary demand the right and the means to do so. To be a Citizen is to care, to take responsibility, to acknowledge one’s inherent power. It is to cultivate meaningful connection to a web of relationships and institutions. Citizenship benefits from a free and expansive imagination, the ability to see how things could be, not just how they currently are. To be a Citizen implies engagement, contribution, and action rather than a passive state of being or receiving.
This is the most accurate sense of the word etymologically: Citizens are literally “together people,” from the Latin, humans defined by the very fact of their togetherness. I for one had assumed it was the other way around, but “city” in fact derives from Citizen — a city is literally a place where people are together — as do “civil,” “civilised,” and “civility” — all words for the art of relating and working and ultimately doing life together.
Being a Citizen is a way of life, almost more a verb than a noun, inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s famous observation “I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process.”
One leading Citizen voice has taken this logic to its full conclusion: in the spring of 2020, as I was writing my book in the UK, Baratunde Thurston launched his podcast called How to Citizen in the USA, explicitly reimagining “Citizen” as a verb and providing inspiration to his listeners on how to participate in collective action and governance in its widest sense. “This is not a show about how a bill becomes a law,” he says. Instead it’s about “who has the power to determine the quality of our lives. We believe the correct answer is all of us.”
Citizenship is a practice, not a status
All of this is distinct from another interpretation of the term, what I have come to think of as citizenship-as-status. Used in this way, the language of citizenship is heavy and charged, a powerful carrier of the xenophobic opposition of an “Us” versus a “Them” that underlies the nationalism and protectionism and racism surging across the world. Access to work and healthcare, freedom of movement, the opportunity to vote, and protection from deportation count among the benefits an official citizen has, and a non-citizen does not. Policies, law and culture around migration, immigration and naturalisation determine who gets these and who does not.
Citizenship-as-status is very much a noun, a legal construct, a possession a person either owns or does not. This legal construct is increasingly unevenly applied, selective and subject to manipulation, privileging people who represent economic advantages, and reflecting legacies of discrimination based on race, religion, and more. In Britain we talk about people being in the country “illegally”; highly targeted social media advertising, largely invisible to those it was not intended to persuade, pitched Brexit as protection against a siege of (mostly Muslim) immigrants, as a reassertion of white English identity. In the USA, those who would close the borders use yet crasser language like “illegal aliens” or even “illegals” to describe human beings.
In reducing it to a possession, citizenship-as-status taints the essence of Citizenship. This in turn creates the space for abuse of fundamental human rights and dignities, dehumanising those who do not have it. The fast-growing number of stateless people worldwide who’ve been denied or stripped of their membership in a nation are not official citizens. People who are permitted to cross borders into wealthier regions to perform undesirable or unprotected kinds of work — like migrant farmworkers and construction workers, or caregivers, or sexworkers — are tolerated (exploited) but extended none of the protections of citizenship-as-status.
At the other end of the spectrum, citizenship-as-status is a possession that can increasingly be bought: more and more people hold dual or triple nationalities, sometimes because of ancestral heritage or true connection or allegiance (as by long-time residence or marriage) to the nation in question, but increasingly based on economics. Many island nations are notorious for offering official citizenship with certain levels of investment — generally six or seven figures — and often act as a gateway. Like that of all EU states, citizenship in Malta, for example, automatically confers official citizenship of the European Union.
These dynamics make citizenship-as-status more pernicious and less relevant, but they make the true Citizen more vital than ever. The language of Citizenship is crucial, and the contest for its meaning is one that must be engaged, not conceded. The Citizenship at the heart of my work is not a question of what passport we hold, it is a story of who we are as human beings: a question of what we can do, and what we should. In these terms, there is no human — regardless of their papers, passport, or criminal record — who cannot be a Citizen, and no limit to what Citizens can do.
Way beyond voting
The tasks that Citizens can and do take on go well beyond the one activity generally associated with citizenship-as-status, namely, voting. In that view, our civic role and responsibility is limited to the single act of choosing representatives. Our contribution is to enter the hallowed booth once every few years in order to cast our vote in the General Election, the occasional referendum, and at most in local council elections. Beyond that, a tiny few might get involved making phone calls or canvassing door-to-door to support a candidate, or sign people up to vote and remind them on the big day. Some might respond to a consultation, sign a petition, or pen a complaint. But that’s about the extent of it.
There is nothing wrong with these actions in themselves, indeed I believe passionately that elected representatives have a vital role to play. But the current situation, where this is the beginning and end of civic engagement, is deeply problematic, for a number of reasons.
The first problem returns directly to the exclusionary nature of citizenship-as-status: a number of people who reside in a given nation are not permitted to vote there, despite being equally if not more significantly impacted by the results of elections. Then there are plenty more who doubt voting makes much difference, anyway, that the choice between Party A and Party B is circumscribed. Uninspired, frustrated, disappointed, a good number of people neglect — or adamantly refuse — to vote, even in the General or Presidential elections. Under existing electoral systems in the US and Britain in particular, there are plenty who live in “safe” seats or states and don’t vote on the basis that their votes will make no difference. In most places where voting is not compulsory, some 30–40% or even more of us don’t vote even in major elections, and when the elections are local, as many as 70–80% of us sit them out.
Then — often accentuating the effects of these problems — there is the potential for corruption, abuse, and manipulation during the disproportionately focal moments that election campaigns represent: something that has always been present, but has in recent years escalated beyond all previous comprehension.
These are challenges that can and should be addressed by electoral reform: expansion of the franchise; introduction of proportional representation and alternative voting systems; oversight and perhaps breakup of the major social media platforms (something to which we will return in chapter 6). These things are essential to the health of our democracies.
But these challenges are just surface symptoms, and these prescriptions are not the primary focus of this book. We need to keep peeling back the layers to get to the root of the problem; we are not done yet.
The next issue with voting lies in how we are invited to make our choices: the question to which we are invited to see our vote as the answer. Increasingly, that question, more or less explicitly, is: “What is in your individual self-interest? What in your view is best for you?”
This has become so taken for granted that my drawing attention to it might seem unnecessary. But the fact is that this very framing of the choice, before any of the money or dirty tricks begin, is a corruption of what voting is all about. In order to contribute constructively to the governance of a nation, voting must operate on the basis of what has come to be known as the “wisdom of the crowd.” For each of us to contribute to the pool of collective wisdom, it is critical that the question we instead answer is: “What is in our collective interest? What is best for the nation as a whole?” When we aggregate our multiple perspectives in answer to this question, we stand a good chance of getting to a better answer than any of us would alone.
When instead the question becomes one of self-interest rather than collective interest, things inevitably fall apart — because we are no longer contributing our different perspectives to the same question. Instead, each of us is answering our own question, with the system attempting to aggregate that. This incentivises political parties, contesting for our votes, to segment and divide us, calculating their efforts to win just enough to tip the majority — no matter how the rest of the population might feel.
As this dynamic deepens its hold over time, competition, division, and aggression become increasingly inevitable — as we can see everywhere when we look around us.
There is one more layer yet to the problematic nature of a sole focus on voting and electoral politics as the expression of citizenship: the very idea that formal government is what it’s all about.
This is politics as a spectator sport at best, rather than a participatory pursuit, and as such as the specialised realm of experts who are another breed to the rest of us, just like professional athletes. Elected officials, civil servants, lawmakers, leaders of governments and architects of world trade agreements tend to have attended one of a handful of select universities and even schools, to hold one of three or four degrees, “turning professional” as early as their teenage years.
As a result, too many tend not to know the lived experience of the majority of people on behalf of whom they are tasked with making decisions. It is a whole other world, with no place, really, for the rest of us: all we are good enough to do is choose between options that someone else has decided to offer us.
This is where the deepest damage is done. Yet what truly matters most is what the rest of us do every day, the convivial and pragmatic dynamics of making choices, compromises and agreements in every sphere of life. This is the domain of Citizens, and it is a space in which voting must take its place as one action among many, not the sole and defining contribution. Official citizens only do capital-P Politics once every few years; Citizens do small-p politics pretty much every day.
As Citizens, we are not our votes: we are our ideas, our energy, our resources. To convey that voting represents the only or even the most meaningful opportunity for contribution shuts almost all of us out — to a greater or lesser extent — and then shuts the remaining few in, piling on pressure that they cannot possibly sustain. Indeed, for all of us and in every sense of the word, this situation is unsustainable.
We can be, and we and need to be, so much more.
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This is an excerpt from a book that is all about the power we all have, how we step into it ourselves, and how we invite others to do the same. You can find more about the book and join my mailing list here. If you want my take on how to actually be a hands-on Citizen, I wrote this for Psyche magazine. If you have a particular interest in politics beyond voting, you might want to check out the RAPID Democracy framework I and the New Citizen Project team launched earlier this year, and also the work I’ve been doing with the Apolitical Foundation, towards engaging more politicians with participatory democracy tools and approaches. You can find that the outputs of that work here.
