Reflexions on ‘ordinary’ citizenship

By Eleni Andreouli

Citizenship, as citizenship scholars are well aware of, is a ‘an essentially contested concept’ (Condor, 2011). The focus of scholarly work, however, remains very much on citizenship as a set of rights and duties afforded by a state to individual citizens, especially at the level of national politics. To be a citizen commonly signifies a status that one has, or one has not. Looking at citizenship as a status, nevertheless, fails to capture first, the different ways that citizens engage with the political outside of formal institutionalised structures, and second, it fails to account for the dynamics of citizenship as an act of making rights claims (Isin, 2009). These two dimensions of citizenship are captured in Neveu’s approach as discussed in her recent talk as part of Citizenship Studies Seminar Series at the Open University. Neveu’s careful ethnographic work in France explores how people become politicised in concrete, local settings, which are supposedly non-political.

Neveu’s approach chimes with recent social psychological work on citizenship, which examines how citizens themselves construct the concept of citizenship and how they negotiate, contest, claim and enact their positions as rights bearers vis-à-vis others (Andreouli, 2019). From this perspective, citizenship is unavoidably relational: our ability to act as citizen is shaped (made possible, restricted, legitimised, etc.) by the kind of (mis-)recognition we receive from by others (Hopkins & Blackwood, 2011), in the course of everyday interactions. Citizenship, in this way, is a ‘living’ practice.

Such a focus on the ‘everyday’ brings the political into the sphere of the ordinary, mundane, and common. Put differently, it places the citizen, and their own local experiences, at the centre of the study of citizenship. As I have previously suggested, the fact that “the perspectives of citizens have been routinely absent from analyses of citizenship, [has] the effect of overlooking the ideological underpinnings of common-sense and de-politicising lay political actors” (Andreouli, 2019). The demonisation of politics as inherently corrupt and the erasure of the political from ‘real life’, under the guise of a supposedly pragmatic and post-ideological decision-making, mask existing power arrangements and antagonisms and limit plurality.

The de-politicisation of the ‘ordinary’ goes hand-in-hand and enables the ‘hijacking’ of the language of common-sense in regressive populist movements. A telling example is Nigel Farage’s (but also Trump’s, Marine Le Pen’s and others’) claim to speak on behalf of ‘the people’, when, for example, he hailed the vote for Brexit as a “victory for ordinary people”. But it is not just the political extremes that do this. It has become commonplace for politicians to say that their political decisions are made on the basis of ‘common-sense’ and ‘neutral’ economic calculations, rather than ‘ideology’. The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak recently (May 2022) described his decision to impose a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, to respond to the cost-of-living crisis in Britain, as pragmatic and decisively not ideological (“We should not be ideological about this, we should be pragmatic”). The category of the ordinary has thus not only been de-politicised, as Neveu has skilfully discussed, but precisely because of that it has also become a discursive resource to advance supposedly non-ideological, common-sensical, political agendas. Unpacking the category of the ordinary, the common is, thus, crucial for understanding the realities of political struggles on the ground and the ways in which these categories are employed in the service of political demagogy.

Andreouli, E. (2019). Social psychology and citizenship: a critical perspective. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13 (2).

Condor, S. (2011). Towards a social psychology of citizenship? Introduction to the special issue. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 21, 193-201.

Isin, E. (2009). Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity, 29, 367-388.

Hopkins, N., & Blackwood, L. (2011). Everyday citizenship: identity and recognition. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 21, 215 – 227.