Varieties of Democratic Experience: Normative Criteria for Cross-national Assessments of Citizenship

Abstract

Of the numerous standards by which we can judge the performance of nation-states, there is perhaps no more important than the quality of citizenship. Characteristics such as stability, effectiveness, and distributional equality are vital indicators of systemic performance, and measures of health, housing, and education are key indicators of the individual quality of life, but only citizenship captures and unites both types of phenomena.

An earlier version of this article was originally prepared at the request of Hans-Dieter Klingemann for presentation at a small workshop on “Criteria for a Democratic Process” at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), April 20–23, 1996. The workshop itself, arranged by Hans-Dieter and Dieter Fuchs, was Klingemann at his best: a small group of highly committed (and highly compatible) researchers freely probing -and occasionally hotly contesting — core issues of democratic governance. For if there is a common core in everything Klingemann has contributed to the social sciences, it is a concern with the basic values, procedures and practice of democracy. His trademark is in this respect highly similar to that of my mentor and colleague, Stein Rokkan, Norway’s foremost contribution to post-war studies of democracy and the conditions for democracy in Europe. The work of Hans-Dieter Klingemann and his numerous student-colleagues in this area can be viewed as both complementary and constructive vis à vis Rokkan’s contribution: complementary, in that Klingemann delves much deeper, both conceptually and empirically, into the actual substance of democratic values, procedures and institutions — how they “work” in practice; and constructive insofar as Klingemann has both explored a broader range of vital “marginal” democratic issues, particularly political protest, direct action and non-democratic values, and updated the perspective to the modern and post-modern challenges of the emerging European Union. As the present paper was first encouraged by Hans-Dieter, and subsequently (for numerous reasons) never published, I feel it is particularly relevant for a festschrift of works reflecting his very strong international influence on a generation of social scientists who have found his exceptional combination of cutting-edge empiricism and traditional concern with the basic values and challenges of democratic governance to be a unique source of critical dialogue in the very best sense of the term.