The Practice and Consequences of Everyday Claim-Making

• In Event: Social Policy and Social Spending in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Everyday citizenship practices—that is, the actions and strategies through which citizens seek, claim, reject, and resist the state in their day-to-day lives—are often overlooked in studies of political behavior, which focus instead on highly visible, pivotal moments: elections, protests, high court decisions, the passing of significant legislation. But what of the politics of the everyday? We show that quotidian claim-making is an increasingly powerful powerful form of citizenship practice prevalent in low and middle-income (LMI) developing democracies that is neither programmatic nor clientelistic in nature. By pursuing administrative and judicial channels, citizens circumvent traditional arenas of interest representation (political parties, legislatures, unions, established social movements), approaching the state not as clients, but as individual and group claimants. We draw on comparative accounts from Latin America, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa to examine the quotidian practices—beyond the electoral arena and below large-scale social movement mobilization—through which citizens pursue economic, social, and civil rights. Our aims are threefold: to call attention to the prevalence and importance of everyday acts of claim-making; to examine the conditions that give rise and shape to these politics; and to reflect on their material and political consequences.

Authors

• Whitney K Taylor, San Francisco State University

• Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, University of Virginia

• Janice Kreinick Gallagher, Rutgers-Newark