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Conferring and Challenging State Legitimacy through Citizenship

Thu, August 31, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hilton Union Square, Union Square 1 & 2

Session Submission Type: Full Submitted Panel

Session Description

Despite a growing interest in citizenship policy among practitioners and academics, the field of comparative citizenship studies remains highly fragmented. First, citizenship analyses tend to fall under different subject areas, e.g., identity politics, democratization, nation-building, and regional studies. This dispersion of citizenship research hinders theoretical and empirical developments in citizenship studies itself. Second, citizenship scholars often deal with either formal citizenship laws or informal experiences with citizenship. This divide inhibits collaboration in developing comprehensive definitions of citizenship based on both institutional and individual components. Third, citizenship research often focuses on citizenship at the state and supra-national level, without examining substate citizenships and their influence on higher level citizenships.

Building on the APSA Meeting’s theme, “The Quest for Legitimacy,” this panel aims to help unify the diverse citizenship literature by focusing on how state, substate, and non-state actors try to use citizenship to confer legitimacy. Specifically, citizenship status is central for providing legitimacy to individuals and groups within a state. In addition, citizenship entails duties from the state, and citizens can challenge a state’s legitimacy by highlighting its failures to provide citizens with promised rights.

The panel’s four papers synthesize insights from multiple regional and methodological perspectives to analyze how actors use citizenship to strengthen or challenge the legitimacy of states or substate groups. The first two papers examine how substate governments engage citizenship at the subnational level to confer legitimacy to groups as well as challenge state-level definitions of citizenship. In “Achieving Citizenship through Joint State and Federal Constitutional Reform,” Robinson Woodward-Burns examines social movements advocating for changes to the U.S. Constitution using an original dataset of 354 proposed state constitutions from 1776–2017 and paired case studies of suffrage reform. Engaging an institutionalist argument, Woodward-Burns finds that granting citizenship rights to a group at the subnational level can legitimize that group’s appeal for these rights at the federal level.

Similarly, Willem Maas demonstrates how substate governments can engage a local form of citizenship to enhance the province’s broader legitimacy. In “Citizenship and Legitimacy,” he examines the case of Quebec citizenship within the state’s Canadian citizenship and argues that, like sovereign states, substate governments and movements can use citizenship to confer legitimacy on residents. Since substate citizenships are inadmissible internationally, the proliferation of these citizenships highlights the central role citizenship can play in legitimizing the distinct identity of a substate group both locally and more broadly.

The second two papers analyze state efforts to legitimize themselves through civic education. Lahra Smith’s paper, “Citizens in the Making,” examines civic education programs in Ethiopia and Kenya, where teachers must balance their professional mission, esteemed local status, and government ties as the state undergoes charged political reforms. In these cases, states expect educators to promote their democratization and citizenship messages. However, Smith finds that, as creative autonomous agents, these educators can challenge the state’s legitimacy by teaching students about controversial, unresolved citizenship issues.

Justine Davis also examines citizen influences on state citizenship using survey data from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Her paper, “Democracy-Promotion in Côte d’Ivoire,” analyzes citizen views toward local nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) working on civic education and advocacy campaigns. She finds that individual views of NGOs as partisan correlates with lower evaluations of the government, its legitimacy, and democratic citizenship in general. These results highlight how a state’s legitimacy can be interconnected with the legitimacy of NGO programs as well as how these initiatives can backfire on efforts to bolster the viability of the state and government.

These papers examine different factors that influence state legitimacy and definitions of state citizenship, including state, substate, non-state, and individual actors. These studies also highlight tensions between institutions and agents in shaping citizenship and state legitimacy. Further, these analyses reflect how substate actors can revise citizenship laws and definitions of the state, which can in turn strengthen or weaken the state’s legitimacy. Altogether, by linking citizenship to legitimacy, these studies help bridge the diverse citizenship literature and launch new debates about who creates citizens, what citizenship means at substate levels, and how subnational actors influence national definitions of citizenship.

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