Theorizing and Analyzing Citizenship in Multicultural Societies

Abstract

I argue that sociologists have directed insufficient attention to the study of citizenship. When citizenship is studied, sociologists tend to concentrate on just one facet: rights. I elaborate four conceptual facets of citizenship. I link two—citizenship as rights and belonging—to theoretical elaborations of multiculturalism. Considering multiculturalism as a state discourse and set of policies, rather than a political or normative theory, I outline linkages between multiculturalism and two additional facets of citizenship: legal status and participation. Over the last 15 years, the idea of multiculturalism has come under withering criticism, especially in Europe, in part because it is claimed that multiculturalism undermines common citizenship. Yet countries with more multicultural policies and a stronger discourse of pluralism and recognition are places where immigrants are more likely to become citizens, more trusting of political institutions, and more attached to the national identity. There is also little evidence that multicultural policies fuel majority backlash, and some modest evidence that such policies enlarge conceptions of inclusive membership. By studying claims-making and the equality of immigrant-origin groups, we see that the participatory aspect of citizenship needs to take center stage in future work in political sociology, social theory, social movements, immigration, and race/ethnicity.

NOTES

Notes

¹ This public sphere was, however, restricted to men, with participatory citizenship excluding women, those without property, slaves, and newcomers to Athens (Pocock 1995).

² Kymlicka's liberalism also requires that groups not constrain individual members' actions, including the right to exit the group or alter group practices.

³ The second generation—the North American–born children of immigrants—in both countries report more identification with the nation than the foreign-born first generation (Bloemraad and Wright 2014:S306).

⁴ MCP is highly correlated with another cultural pluralism index constructed by Koopmans and colleagues (2012). For further details on scoring the MCP index, see http://www.queensu.ca/mcp/immigrant.html, last retrieved 4 October 2014.

⁵ On Canada, see Triadafilopoulos (2012) and Winter (2011), on Australia, see Lopez (2000) and Koleth (2010), and on Sweden, see Borevi (2013a, 2013b).

⁶ For evidence that right-of-center parties also supported multiculturalism, see Borevi (2013a), who writes that initial support for Swedish diversity policies in the 1960s came from the Conservatives. In Canada, expansion of multiculturalism in the 1980s was undertaken by the right-of-center Conservatives (Winter 2011; Triadafilopoulos 2012).

⁷ Naturalization in the United States is low in part due to the large undocumented population, a group with no access to citizenship. Based on calculations using Department of Homeland Security figures (Rytina 2013), 58 percent of immigrants with permanent legal status and at least 5 years of residence in the United States (the minimum requirement for naturalization) had acquired U.S. citizenship in 2012. This still falls 20–25 percentage points short of levels in Canada. I have argued elsewhere that the gap is in part due to the lack of federal integration and multicultural policies in United States as compared to those in Canada (Bloemraad 2006b).