Democracy and citizenship: expanding domains

Saward, Michael (2006). Democracy and citizenship: expanding domains. In: Dryzek, John S.; Honig, Bonnie and Phillips, Anne eds. The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory. The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 400–419.

Abstract

Contemporary political theory includes lively debates about the meaning and scope of both democracy and citizenship. To survey and comment on some key recent threads in the arguments, I adopt the frame of ‘expanding domains’ and link the two concepts together, to ask: what impact might different innovations in democratic thinking have on our conception of citizenship? I will explore key ways in which elements of contemporary innovative conceptions of democracy – deliberative, ‘difference’, cosmopolitan, ecological and others - seek to reconstruct and reconstrue citizens and citizenship (and often disagree with each other in the process, within and across these categories of innovation). I shall do this, first, by pinpointing some key ways in which these innovations – openly or implicitly - seek to reconfigure citizenship along three key dimensions, and secondly, by showing how expanding our thinking about a third core political concept – representation – is crucial in efforts to respond to the expanded domains of citizenship and democracy.

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