Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The concurrence of holding democratic political attitudes with low levels of conformity to their behavioral prescriptions is conceptualized in the present study as constituting an incongruity or discrepancy of the political-self. The general theoretical argument presented within this paper is that the failure to meet the citizen performance expectations imparted by ones own participatory political attitudes serves as a potential source of negative self-evaluation. The specific research question motivating the present study is whether attitudes toward external political objects, such as politicians, can be and are employed by citizens as a means of addressing a self-discrepancy and defending against negative self-evaluation. To assess this question empirically, the 2006 United States Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy (CID) Survey was utilized to test the hypothesis that incongruent citizens will hold more distrusting attitudes toward politicians than congruent citizens. The findings of the survey analysis were that incongruent citizens were more extreme in their level of trust toward politicians, but that the sign and significance of this effect is moderated by right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). Incongruent citizens who scored low on a measure of RWA were found to be significantly more trusting of politicians than congruent citizens while incongruent citizens scoring high on RWA were significantly less trusting of politicians than congruent citizens. The paper concludes with a discussion of “motivated attitude acquisition” as well as the plausibility of utilizing RWA as a proxy for individual differences in the tendency to engage in defensive motivated reasoning, self-justification, and blame externalization.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper considers the current efforts to describe the effect of Internet-based technology on interactivity between citizens and public organizations to be incomplete and poorly linked. This paper develops a model of interactivity that reflects the self-organization potential of virtual communication and the social context within which citizens and bureaucrats operate. The model helps us to identify ways in which different levels of feedback communication, e.g., email, may affect change in organizations, communities, and the relationship between organizations and communities. A case analysis of the Chicago Police Department's (CPD) Citizen ICAM is reviewed to determine the effects of feedback and the technology on the organization. We find that virtual interactivity is a complex process - more complex than typically described - that has significant effects on the structure and work processes of the CPD. We conclude by proposing a staged model of citizen-government interactivity and by identifying future research directions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There is now substantial research that suggests that collective identity is important in the development of political opinion. This paper investigates this proposition using qualitative data from a case study of the British Columbia Citizens Assembly, a unique experiment in democratic deliberation, where randomly selected citizens were empowered to learn about, deliberate on and recommend a new electoral system. The case of the Citizens Assembly is novel in demonstrating that even where pre-existing collective identities don’t exist, a group process can stimulate the development of a cohesive identity through which information is analyzed and opinions are formed. This is an important empirical insight into the way that public deliberation works. The “force of the better argument” does not lie in a process of abstract reasoning; rather, information and arguments are weighed and measured using collective identification and practical group experience.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: What defines the “new” global citizen? While it has certainly been argued that something akin to a global citizenship exists today, especially in arguments based on participation in an emergent global civil society (Falk; Deibert), it is difficult to argue that something as formally integrated into the notion of the nation-state truly exists. This is not to say that the experience of something like citizenship, or some form of cultural or political belonging and practice, cannot exist outside the nation-state. The same discursive practices, cultural education, and ideological factors that construct citizenship as a political identity may also affect forms of identity that transcend the nation-state as the primary source of identification. This paper draws upon Castells’ depiction of the “network society” and Canclini’s theorization of citizenship-as-consumption to elaborate what alternative solidarities outside the tight connection between the nation and the individual might look like under conditions of globalization.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In recent years, a growing number of political theorists and social critics have called for a revival of liberal notions of national citizenship. The demographic revolution caused by mass migration and the fractious “multiculturalism” that has accompanied these population changes have stimulated calls for rebuilding a common civic culture based on a strong sense of national citizenship. The recent surge in the study of citizenship has been laudable. But skeptics have questioned citizenship’s actual potential as a guarantor of equality and social democracy in a rapidly changing world. The most compelling of these critiques examine the question of how non-citizens themselves have grappled with the contradictions of citizenship, which is the focus of this paper.

Drawing on historical examples from a larger manuscript tracing the debate over citizenship through the twentieth century, I argue that non-citizens in the United States never adopted a unitary position on the question of citizenship. Instead, and at both ends of the century, they crafted a range of approaches to the practice of citizenship. These included assimilationist stances, but also, and significantly, pluralist visions -- whether described as “cultural pluralism” or “multiculturalism” -- that affirmed the right of migrants to maintain their languages and cultural practices. Some of these pluralist stances sought to transcend the nation-state through transnational political organizing -- as with, to take one example, the Pan-American efforts of El Congreso de Pueblos que Hablan Español (Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples) in the late 1930s. Just as significantly, many other non-citizens rejected political engagement with the American nation-state entirely. Non-citizens often operated from logics that were at cross-purposes with the conventional politics of citizenship and national consolidation and that led them to alternative forms of political identity, mobilization, and practice.

This range of stances toward citizenship reflected the inevitable antinomies and alterities created during the consolidation of nation-states in the context of mass migrations and capitalism’s global expansion. Those developments fostered interstitial -- often, transnational -- social spaces in which non-citizens explored different ways of being political. I shall draw on revisionist scholarship about the shifting nature of U.S. citizenship to argue that, although non-citizens could never ignore the state’s power to shape their actions, they quickly developed an array of strategies rooted in their cultures of origin and their unique understanding of transnational contexts to negotiate their transition into novel environments. Such strategies often did include the pursuit of naturalized citizenship and conventional political organization -- efforts that could evince a pluralist as well as an assimilationist stance. However, I will argue that other non-citizen strategies involved resistance and even curt refusal to accept the premises of the dominant political order. Exploring these different non-citizen stances enables us not only to discern how some migrants forged pluralist understandings of their place in U.S., but also to put such migrant pluralisms in context, as just one set of a range of strategies non-citizens pursued.