Citizenship and Public Policy

Abstract

‘Citizenship and public policy’ refers to the political processes whereby the state translates the entitlements of social citizenship into effective administrative and legislative arrangements. The terms ‘public policy’ and ‘social policy’ are generally used interchangeably in the literature, and conceptual efforts to differentiate them effectively have been inconclusive. By contrast, the notion of ‘citizenship’ is less ambiguous, referring to the rights and obligations of members of a political community, typically a nation state. ‘Social citizenship’ is often employed to distinguish between a narrow range of political rights (for instance the right to vote) and an extensive ensemble of entitlements to health, education, and welfare. In European social science, the study of citizenship has focused on those welfare policies that alleviate inequalities in the market, especially social class. In the USA, research on citizenship has been primarily concerned with understanding migration, ethnicity, and naturalization. The analysis of citizenship and public policy is essentially the analysis of different forms of welfare regime. It is conventional to distinguish between three legacies: liberal, social democratic, and corporatist models. These regimes constructed very different patterns of citizenship, and correspondingly had different public policy traditions. In general terms, the politics of the modern state have oscillated between public policies that required either laissez-faire economics or some degree of state regulation. In the period following World War Two, social reconstruction required some version of social Keynesian policy. More recently, the dominance of neoliberalism has rejected bureaucratic and centralized welfare systems in favour of recommodification. These policies have often encouraged partnerships between state, the market, charities, and voluntary associations. Public policy in the future will have to respond to the impact of economic globalization on the political sovereignty of the nation state, because policy regimes will, for example, be under constant pressure from global financial markets.