Citizen Agency Research Articles

Hacking democratic innovations: the problem of agency in deliberative systems

ABSTRACT Empowering citizens through democratic innovations has long been a central goal of government intervention. Despite the transformative rhetoric that has accompanied their implementation, democratic innovations have gained support and political presence, however, while moving away from public decision-making processes. A recent example are deliberative mini-publics. The problem has to do with a conception that relativizes the agency of citizens in political systems, an issue that is very visible in the systemic turn of deliberation. From this perspective, agency is diluted in a dynamic of interconnected deliberative settings far from the decision-making centers. The objective of this essay is to analyze a hybrid deliberative framework conceived from the outset around the political agency of citizens. We show how deliberation can improve participatory systems, without needing to replace agency with diffuse communicative mediation. To do this, we analyze the successes and failures of its implementation in the city of Madrid.

Learning to (not quite) buy nothing: Digital gift economies and household innovations reducing consumption

The daunting task of swiftly transitioning to sustainable modes of living presents a formidable challenge, particularly at individual and household levels, where entrenched consumption and disposal systems exhibit strong path dependency. This research investigates how individuals and households can contribute to sustainability transitions through grassroots innovations. Specifically, we ask: How do digital gift economies facilitate changes in household consumption practices and contribute to broader sustainability transitions? To address this question, we present an instructional case study of the Buy Nothing Project (BNP), a globally scaled yet locally focused digital gift economy, as a grassroots innovation enabling citizen agency within domestic spaces. BNP is a socio-technical network of hyperlocal, digital gift-giving groups that advocate for community reliance and generosity to reduce household consumption and waste and build neighbourhood bonds. Our analysis reveals that BNP's most revolutionary aspect lies in the embedded everyday sustainability practices it facilitates, particularly the social learning to reduce consumption at individual, household, and community levels through group participation and ongoing membership. We argue that this grassroots innovation enables citizen agency within domestic spaces, contributing significantly to sustainability transitions. Paradoxically, the ordinariness of these practices, combined with the gendered composition of members and that acquiring and disposing of household goods is usually considered “women's work”, may hinder recognition of BNP's potential as a powerful catalyst for sustainable transitions. This study contributes to our understanding of how digital platforms can support household-level innovations in sustainability practices and highlights the importance of recognising and valuing diverse forms of contribution to sustainability transitions.

Emotional capital in citizen agency: Contesting administrative burden through anger

Abstract The literature on administrative burden has focused on cognitive, material, and social resources, leaving emotional strategies and processes largely unexplored. This study begins to address this research gap by elaborating Illouz’ (2007) concept of emotional capital in the context of citizen agency. The article uses the concept emotional capital to analyze claimant anger in response to administrative burdens examining the question: how do citizens understand and maneuver the potential benefits and risks of expressing their anger when experiencing administrative burdens? The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Danish job centers involving interviews with 71 claimants and observations of 10 conversations between caseworkers and claimants. The article contributes to theorize the role of emotions in citizen-state encounters by showing that emotional capital works as a resource moderating the experience of and coping with administrative burden

Citizen participation through different mechanisms: does social media impact adoption and design of local sustainability plans?

ABSTRACT Sustainability plans are essential for fostering prosperous cities for present and future generations. The degree of citizen agency, control, and power in shaping plans varies across different participatory mechanisms. Despite its popularity and ubiquity, how social media, as a new form of participatory mechanism, shapes government sustainability plans remains relatively unclear. Therefore, by using a 2015 nationwide survey of U.S. local government administrators, this study examines social media’s influences on plan adoption and design, particularly in comparison to conventional participatory mechanisms. The findings provide insights for public managers on how to leverage different participatory mechanisms in advancing a sustainability plan.

Citizenship and agency in the context of Nicaragua’s participatory authoritarianism

ABSTRACT This article analyses the technologies of participatory authoritarianism (Owen 2020) and how they construct citizenship through discourses and spaces. It further analyses how marginalised citizens generate a sense of citizen agency through recognising their personal and collective agency and constructing alternative narratives. This article theorises marginalised citizenship by drawing on existing theory, and on data generated through participatory research with groups of marginalised citizens in Nicaragua. The research illuminated how ideas, experiences and expressions of citizenship are shaped by governmental discourses and invited spaces of participation, and by citizens’ own subjectivities and histories. The research employed mixed methods including document analysis, key informant interviews, and participatory methods which incorporated sequenced storytelling and collective analysis. This approach identified factors which are generative of citizen subjectivity and agency within participatory authoritarianism.

Representation of an Elderly Person in Polish Social Campaigns. A Case Study

The article discusses the portrayal of the elderly in social campaigns, specifically in the campaign of the Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs. As most of the existing studies have focused on advertising, there is a research gap concerning the representation of the elderly in social campaigns that the present paper aims to fill. Combining insights based on critical discourse analysis and social semiotics, the study is grounded in multimodal discourse analysis, which allows one to perform a thorough investigation of various modes to determine how they form a coherent meaning. Overall, the portrayal of the elderly person was positive as they were shown as active and independent users of the Internet, which differs from the traditional representation of such people. Encouraging the audience to emulate the actions and behaviour of the protagonist appears to be a good solution regarding middle- and upper-class senior citizens as they have both social and financial capital to act like Barbara Bursztynowicz, who appears in the campaign. However, this might not be as effective regarding people who are digitally excluded. The discussed campaign successfully challenges stereotypical views on old age (i.e. senior citizens not being able to use modern technologies, or being dependent on younger family members), offering a different and positive perspective by emphasizing the agency of senior citizens.

Hope amid violence: youths’ agency and learning experiences to transform social conflicts in non-democratic settings

Understanding and addressing conflicts underlying direct and indirect violence is necessary to build a just and sustainable peace. This study foregrounds youths’ voices and lived experiences of social conflicts in Iran, an understudied (semi-)authoritarian context in the Middle East. It examines selected youths’ socially constructed understandings of the conflicts and violence affecting their lives, their perceptions of their roles and agency in non-violently addressing those conflicts, and the learning experiences and social pedagogies (inside and outside school) available to them that might have contributed to forming their understandings and agency. The study’s intersectional gender- and social-class-sensitive design enables an understanding of how social-structural, cultural and political dynamics interacted with participating youths’ experiences of social conflicts and their peacebuilding citizenship agency. Findings show that social conflicts that the participating youths were concerned about varied in their differing gender and social class locations. In addition, despite the disconnections between the participating students’ lived experiences of conflicts and their learning opportunities at school, the findings point to spaces of feasibility for schools to enhance students’ opportunities to develop key aspects of peacebuilding agency, even in (semi-)authoritarian settings where citizenship and peace education are absent from the explicit curriculum. Moreover, the research expands the international conceptualisation of peacebuilding agency by showing that young people’s frequent responses to the social conflicts in their lives in (semi-)authoritarian contexts (avoidance, conformity, withdrawal and despair) cannot be simply interpreted as apathy or lack of awareness of the larger structural issues.

Perceived burdens of interacting with public authorities: How does it influence citizens' state‐encounter behavior?

AbstractMuch research has shown that implementation behavior of frontline workers and the outcomes of public policies depend on encounters between frontline workers and citizens. However, relatively little is known about the agency of citizens in these encounters. This paper focuses on administrative burdens and psychological responses to stress as possible determinants of citizens' encounter behavior—defined as “behavioral efforts citizens employ during and in preparing for interaction with public authorities in order to master the demands of the public encounter.” Combining a framework categorizing citizens' state‐encounter behavior and theory about administrative burdens, we ask whether citizens' behavior reflects their perceptions of administrative burdens, and whether learning, psychological and compliance burdens prompt different encounter behaviors? We use data from surveys among a representative sample of 1460 Danish citizens regarding encounters with tax and home care authorities. We find that perceived administrative burdens affect citizens' behavior, but contrary to expectations, we do not find that burdens discourage citizens from engaging with authorities. Higher perceived burdens tend to prompt activist behavior. Moreover, different types of burdens affect behaviors differently.

Enactors of the State: The Everyday Coproduction of Security in the Prevention of Radicalisation

Since 2001, studies of (counter)terrorism and (counter)radicalisation have burgeoned. However, at times, these literatures have reduced the agency of ordinary citizens, imagining them as ‘actors of the state’ and ‘petty sovereigns’. By integrating vernacular security approaches with allied research in Education, we develop a novel ontological conceptualisation of ordinary citizens as ‘enactors of the state’, engaged in the everyday coproduction of security. The article presents the findings of a survey, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, conducted in Manchester’s Further Education sector, following the 2017 Arena attack. We capture the security enactments of 95 elites, professionals, teachers, and students. Our data reveal the complex interactions, ensembles, and assemblages at the heart of security’s everyday coproduction. In contrast to existing approaches, we show how this creative dynamic operates through citizens’ variegated imbrications with state policy, complex relationalities, and subtle nuances in everyday enactment.

Empathetic Solidarity: How Chinese English-Language Media Portrays Urban Community Participation

ABSTRACT This article examines how Chinese state media tries to legitimize and promote civic solidarity in its portrayal of grassroots community participation to an international audience. It performed a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 758 articles published in major Chinese English-language newspapers between 2001 and 2022. The results reveal a message of ‘empathetic solidarity’ in which Western ideas of liberty are blended, or hybridized, with the Chinese discourse of caring to ‘serve the people’, a fusion of Confucian culture and CCP’s socialist values. This study finds that code hybridization in Chinese media coverage serves a dual purpose: to highlight the agency of individual citizens in the context of caring for others and to legitimize state interference in community issues. By centering civic solidarity in caring and service for ordinary people, the media expands and transforms the code of liberty with a mutual collaboration between the government and individuals.

Wages or Legitimacy? A Qualitative Analysis of Home Care Worker Perspectives in Choosing Work Settings.

Directly-Funded (DF) home care allows users to organize and purchase their own care services and is expanding globally. Little is known about the career pathways of home care workers. Our study asks, what experiences and factors do home care workers consider when choosing a work setting? And, specifically, what influences their decisions to work directly for their clients? Framed with Cranford's (2020) flexibility-security matrix for analyzing home care dynamics, we remotely interviewed 20 home care workers in two Canadian provinces. Three team members conducted axial coding and thematic analysis using Dedoose software. We identified personal and material factors at the intimate and labor market level that workers weigh when choosing whether to work for an agency or directly for a client. At the intimate level, workers value the flexibility, autonomy, and respect facilitated in care relations when working directly for a client. At the labor market level, agencies provide better job security and the benefit of supervisory support but lower wages. Additionally, as care work often serves as a stepping stone for immigration and citizenship agency positions are considered a more "legitimate" option than working directly for a client. Our study shows that workers directly employed by their clients enjoy more flexibility but lack security, whereas agency employed workers risk immediate reductions in working conditions in exchange for limited improvements in safety and supervision and, like other frontline care work, DF home care represents a key career pathway for immigrants with previous experience in health and social care settings.

From inevitable disaster to Ineradicable possibility: Critical pedagogies of ecocide, educational privatization, and new technology

From climate disaster to the specter of nuclear annihilation to the rise of fascism and destruction of democracy to the advent of AI and other potentially destructive technologies, a number of material threats are matched by symbolic threats that undermine the capacities of people to respond. The war on public and critical education and the public sphere, the erosion of investigative journalism, ideologies of cynicism, and the crises of critical theoretical tools and literacies undermine individual and collective agency to respond to these threats. The result of these material threats and crises of agency is political paralysis, cynicism, and despair. This article focuses on three material and symbolic disasters: (1) climate crisis and natural disaster; (2) the privatization of public education in continuing and new digital forms as part of the broader rightist war on the public; and (3) the rise of authoritarian anti-democratic movements. The threats posed by these phenomena are bolstered by ideologies in education that are profoundly deterministic, fatalistic, and anti-agentic. The first section briefly details these intertwined threats and the ideologies about them. The second section makes the case for modes of education and pedagogy that inform the understanding and agency of teachers, citizens, and other meaning making actors to challenge these threats and pursue public and democratic values and build institutions of care and security.

Habermas, Popular Sovereignty, and the Legitimacy of Law

Habermas’ theory of popular sovereignty has received comparatively little sustained critical attention in the Anglo-American literature since initial responses to Between Facts and Norms. In light of subsequent work on group agency, this paper argues that Habermas’ reconstruction of popular sovereignty—in its denial of the normative force of collective citizen action—is best understood as a renunciation of the doctrine. The paper is structured in three sections. Section 1 examines Habermas’ treatment of popular sovereignty prior to Between Facts and Norms as both (i) a principle of constitutional legitimacy or normative justification for the modern Rechtsstaat and (ii) a concept of legitimation for the rule of the ascendant liberal bourgeoisie. Section 2 then argues that Habermas’ reconstruction of popular sovereignty in Between Facts and Norms, by discounting the role of collective citizen agency in the justification of the modern constitutional state, empties the doctrine of its core normative content. The final section briefly elaborates on this claim by reference to Habermas’ theory of the public sphere.

Mapping Municipal Colonialism: Counternarratives of Neighbourhood-as-Home in Strathcona, 1968–69

Recent scholarship on neighbourhood organizations and their attempts to stop urban renewal focuses on the agency of citizens and the difficulty in defining the boundaries of what makes a neighbourhood. This article contributes to the scholarship on neighbourhood activism by examining the formation of the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association, in Vancouver in 1968, through the lens of decolonial performance studies to illustrate the differing definitions of home and domesticity during the postwar period. The City of Vancouver’s justification for demolishing the neighbourhood of Strathcona followed a colonial progress narrative, which conflated home and housing as an economic commodity, whereas for the residents of Strathcona home was more than an investment as it also encapsulated their feelings of belonging to their dwelling, each other, and the surrounding commercial areas. This article challenges the view that urban renewal is a different phase of urban development, but instead highlights the continuity between early settler-colonial and postwar ideas about housing to argue that colonialism is a structure embedded in civic attitudes and language in discussions of housing, homemaking, and domesticity that are then reinforced through zoning, by-laws, and neighbourhood regulations. By drawing parallels between early settler-colonial use of maps, surveys, land-use guidelines, and urban renewal plans, this article explains how the same tools and ideas implemented to justify the dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands were reanimated as tools of expropriation in the post-war period to justify the demolition of a multicultural working-class neighbourhood. The residents in Strathcona successfully countered the City of Vancouver’s view of their neighbourhood by creating their own maps, surveys, and suggestions for how land could be used to justify rehabilitation and preservation of their sense of home, thereby illustrating that there is nothing neutral or objective about urban development practices.

Reconceptualizing Cross-Cutting Political Expression on Social Media: A Case Study of Facebook Comments During the 2016 Brexit Referendum

ABSTRACT Political communication research has long sought to understand the effects of cross-cutting exposure on political participation. Here, we argue for a paradigm shift that acknowledges the agency of citizens as producers of cross-cutting expression on social media. We define cross-cutting expression as political communication through speech or behavior within a counter-attitudinal space. After explicating our conceptualization of cross-cutting expression, we empirically explore: its extent, its relationship to political arguments, and its implications for digital campaigning during the 2016 Brexit Referendum. Our dataset, comprising 2,198,741 comments from 344,884 users, is built from Facebook comments to three public campaign pages active during the Brexit referendum: StrongerIn, VoteLeave, and LeaveEU. We utilize reactions data to sort partisans into “Remain” and “Brexit” camps and, thereafter, chart users’ commenting flows across the three pages. We estimate 29% of comments to be cross-cutting, and we find strong correlations between cross-cutting expression and reasoned political arguments. Then, to better understand how cross-cutting expression may influence political participation on social media, we topic model the dataset to identify the political themes discussed during the Brexit debate on Facebook. Our findings suggest that political Facebook pages are not echo chambers, that cross-cutting expression correlates with reasoned political arguments, and that cross-cutting expression may influence the online voter mobilization potential of political Facebook pages.

Citizen action for accountability in challenging contexts: What have we learned?

SummaryMotivationWhile much is known about how citizens mobilize and make claims for accountability in more democratic, stable, and peaceful settings, little is known about how accountability dynamics work in more challenging contexts—those more democratically weak, politically fragile, and affected by legacies of violence and conflict.PurposeThis article introduces a special issue that brings together findings from across the Action for Empowerment and Accountability programme. The programme explored citizen action for accountability and citizens' experiences of governance in Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan and, to a lesser degree, Egypt—countries that reflect challenging conditions now common in many places across the world.Methods and approachWe introduce and summarize the key findings of eight commissioned articles—some which explore specific themes across the body of research, and some that report findings of particular multi‐country studies. We analyse these findings in relation to what they tell us about the contextual factors that matter, the strategies adopted, and the consequences of citizen‐led social and political action.FindingsWe find a number of contextual challenges for citizen action that are common, though not unique, to these settings. Despite authoritarian governance histories, and norms of fear, low expectations, and patriarchal exclusion we see diverse examples of social and political action, both open questioning of authorities and dissent and more under the radar and mediated responses. Such efforts have led to increased visibility of grievances, increased citizen agency, some concrete responses from authorities, and evidence of progressive norm change.Policy implicationsWe argue that even in challenging contexts there are prospects for finding some space for productive citizen engagement and citizen‐led social and political action. These are more likely to be found from taking a “citizen‐eye” view to relevant governance dynamics, actors, and identifying the most important issues. Networks and alliances, including with donors, are significant. But accountability goals in such contexts need to be realistic and recognize the importance of small steps and establishing the building blocks of better governance.

Waiting during disasters: Negotiating the spatio‐temporalities of resilience and recovery

AbstractAlways spatial, waiting time is the observation of past‐present‐future, and temporality is the condition of being bounded by time. Both are mechanisms of state governance that control how and when families recover from rapid‐onset humanitarian disasters. Analysing these spatio‐temporalities reveals how families leverage resources to engage in acts of resilience that challenge the state’s spatio‐temporal control of recovery. A case study focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. We draw on qualitative longitudinal research to explore politicised spatio‐temporal experiences of waiting for the state to fix public infrastructures; approve financial support; and provide access to affordable consumables—which all shape families’ recovery rates and pathways. Disaster‐affected families do not passively wait for the state and often leverage their incomes and social networks to engage in resilience‐based strategies that ease their everyday lives and enable recovery while waiting for the state. Waiting feels more arduous for families with fewer resources and when there is uncertainty about access to the state and how and when to begin certain recovery activities. Waiting in disasters can also provide space for collective socio‐political practices such as community gardening to emerge in neighbourhoods. For researchers of disasters, this article highlights the spatio‐temporal dimensions of grassroots resilience and the ways in which state power and citizen agency interact in ways that subvert state control of families’ recovery rates in heterogeneous ways. Research on waiting during disasters has great potential to inform and reform governance for resilience and recovery.

Crises, Covid-19, and Entrepreneurship

This virtual special issue includes research on the effects of crises, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, on entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial responses to deal with consequences of crises. This issue highlights how crises affect entrepreneurs’ well-being and reinforce the importance of agency of entrepreneurs and other citizens. The special issue also highlights the need for resilience; the ability of entrepreneurs, organizations, and economies to absorb and adapt to shocks; and how it can be strengthened. We discuss the importance of data in times of crisis and the greater need for engaged scholarship.

Catholic Abortion Discourse and the Erosion of Democracy

Since World War II, US Catholic anti-abortion discourse has been framed in term of rights-language, ascribing civil and human rights to the prenate from the moment of conception. Yet many of those who would criminalize abortion have allied with anti-democratic political movements that buttress White supremacy and threaten civil rights. This contradiction exposes the theoretical inadequacy and epistemological hubris of current Catholic abortion discourse. While the Catholic Church and individual Catholics may subscribe to absolute moral norms against abortion, they should not leverage rights-language to legislate such norms in a pluralistic democracy. Instead, Catholics should draw on our rich tradition of virtuous practical reasoning for an abortion ethic that honors the moral agency of pregnant persons and democratic citizens.

Older adult Cubans moving to the Canary Islands (Spain): Migrants' strategies in later life

The research on migration to Spain of Cuban citizens in later life proposes to overcome the lack of academic knowledge from these analytical perspectives: migrations of older adult people beyond the issue of lifestyle mobility; the transnational diasporic nexus favoring migrations; and the Cuban community residing abroad, outside the United States of America. The combination of these elements in this case study shows the agency of older adult Cuban citizens who move to the Canary Islands, trying to achieve a greater level of material well-being and taking advantage of the diasporic ties between the Canary Islands and Cuba; but this is a process that brings out, simultaneously, feelings of dislocation and nostalgia in the stage of old age. The development of a mixed methodology and the focus on the life course of migrants offer an opportunity to reflect on the cultural and social construction of ageing in migration studies. Consequently, this research allows a deepening of knowledge on human mobility from the perspective of ageing in a counter-diasporic migration, showing the relationship between emigration and life cycle and demonstrating the strength and spirit of achievement of those individuals who decide to emigrate despite their advanced age.