Responsibility and the Deliberative Citizen: Theorizing the Acceptance of Individual and Citizenship Responsibilities

Abstract

The responsibilities of citizenship have, in recent years, become a central concern in political and policy debates. Nevertheless, the practical meanings of such responsibilities have remained opaque. This article examines these meanings by asking what theories of citizenship have to say about how people engage with, and accept, their responsibilities. An examination of how the liberal, communitarian, republican and deliberative democratic theories explain the way citizens engage with their responsibilities shows that only deliberative democratic theory provides a nuanced range of concepts that may explain the acceptance of responsibility. In specific, Habermas's deliberative democratic theory is underpinned by a model of how the individual may develop a range of mental capacities to accept the extensive responsibilities associated with the deliberative citizen. By explaining how the individual grapples with her personal responsibilities, this approach also explains how she can deal with her responsibilities as a citizen. Four discourses through which people accept their responsibilities are thereby identified. These include egotistical, conformist, reformist and reflexive discourses. These discourses are explored by drawing on interviews with groups for whom the privatization of responsibility may have particular meanings. Using these interviews, this paper explores how people accept their personal responsibilities, thereby unfolding the discourses people use to deal with their citizenship responsibilities. In particular, by accepting the deliberative democratic contention that the individual already has the capacities to act as the deliberative citizen, it is possible to come to a view of just how people accept both their personal and citizenship responsibilities.