Legal Civic Orders and Equitable Lived Citizenships

Rogers M. Smith

American Political Science Review, 2022, vol. 116, issue 1, 101-115

Abstract: Most modern Western political theories embrace equal citizenship as a normative ideal. Many scholars, however, focus on “legal citizenship” and conceive of equal citizenship as uniformity of legal rights and duties. Others focus on experiences of “lived citizenship” and conceive of equal citizenship as achieving sufficient economic, political, and social standing for persons to be seen as civic equals. Using the United States as its example, this article offers a unifying framework for mapping the relationship of legal citizenship to lived citizenship. It illustrates the value of this framework by using it show why realistic efforts to achieve equal citizenship must aim for not uniform legal rights and duties but instead equity in the possession of economic resources, political representation, and social recognition among different categories of citizens.

Date: 2022
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