​The Active Citizen

Democracies depend on the support of their citizens. This blog looks at the different ideas about what kinds of citizen engagement are necessary for democracy to flourish.

Background
 
The minimum requirement of a citizen in a democracy is to be ready to vote at elections so that governments are responsive to what the people want. However, at the other end of the scale, ideas encompass not only more active engagement in practical politics but also for citizens to stand ready to judge the system itself and to initiate change if necessary. There are different ideas about what engagement and active support requires both with respect to the practice of politics as well as with the system itself.
 
The citizen as voter/elector
 
Representative government started with a minimalist conception of what was required from those with the entitlement to vote. The founders of the American system of government saw voters as ignorant about public policy and looked to better informed and more knowledgeable representatives to steer public policy. The task of the citizen was to vote for these more knowledgeable representatives who could act on their behalf and interpret what was in their best interest. In turn, those elected to office would have an incentive to be responsive to the concerns of the electorate because they would want to be re-elected.
 
Later in the 19th century JS Mill, also concerned with the ignorance of electorates, framed the minimum role of voters in terms of drawing on their own ‘experiments in living’. This meant that in their voting they could provide their representatives with feedback on existing policies based on their own experience.
 
From this minimalist start, the scope of the responsibilities of electors has broadened to include the sense that they have a ‘civic duty’ to act as more than voters and participate more widely in politics.
 
The citizen as participant
 
Politics is not the first claim on the attention of most people and many wish to minimise the time they spend on it. Engagement therefore is sometimes framed in terms of a civic ‘duty’ rather than a spontaneous act. It is what we owe our democratic system of government for the many ties of association it provides. The scope of civic duty was defined by JS Mill in terms of the active citizen. This meant that the citizen had to actively engage in debate with others and in particular with those with whom they disagreed. If there was disagreement over matters of public policy they had to be ready to persuade others to their own point of view and to be ready to change their own mind. This version of citizen participation is reflected in modern versions of Town Hall democracy that try to ensure active debate.
 
The difficulty with the idea of active citizens accepting a civic duty to engage in Town Hall debate is that cognitive studies draw attention to how much people are anchored within their own prejudices and predispositions and pay more attention to those whom they agree with rather than those with whom they have disagreements. People seem not ready to change their mind even when exposed to contrary views.
 
The limits of the attention people wish to pay to politics in their daily lives does not nullify     the idea that people should still actively engage with it. But their role can be seen again in the narrower terms of providing feedback – flagging what is important to them and what is not. ‘Ordinary politics’ with minimal engagement remains important. If politicians disregard what people see as important in their lives, then they are likely to be punished at the polls. Ordinary politics thus remains responsive to minimal participation.
 
The virtual citizen
 
Debates about active citizenship and the scope of civic duties are being transformed by the arrival of the information economy symbolised by the arrival of the internet and AI. This changes the way we gather information, learn, mobilise, participate and provide feedback.
 
The arrival of the internet means that we no longer rely on the traditional media or on our neighbours, or even professionals for information but go to Google, or ChatGPT or Claude. We are no longer faced with a scarcity but a superabundance of information. The world of the virtual citizen is one defined by feelings of identity where the bounds of geography no longer apply and divisions between what belongs to the public sector and what belongs to the private are undergoing radical change. The providers are private platform providers rather than the traditional public sector providers of public and common goods. If we are concerned about the effect on the environment or power supplies arising from building data centres, or are concerned about the effect on bird migration of wind farms, then we go to websites where we can find those with similar concerns. We identify, group together and get grouped together with those who are like-minded. Our civic duty consists partly in setting up defences in our engagement with the social media against being grouped together in ways we disapprove of.
 
The way our beliefs are shaped also change. Political parties, the traditional aggregators of political opinion, have themselves to adapt to the different ways in which people group and get grouped together with other like-minded persons. Traditional political parties have to engage with identity-based politics and build narratives that bring together different groups of the likeminded or accept a world of multi-party coalition building.
 
Identity politics is often built around negative narratives about ‘the other’ – for example the ‘insiders’ who disregard ‘outsiders’ or those whose ties of association feel threatened by imports of goods and services or by immigrants. The active citizen has to combat these negative narratives as well as turn their attention to the way power is exercised in the system itself that feeds these negative narratives.
 
The citizen as judge of the system
 
The starting point for ideas about engagement with the system itself is that democracies require something more than that people simply accept or acquiesce in the system of government into which they are born. There has to be a meaning given to the idea that the legitimacy of democratic systems of government depends on some form of citizen consent to or influence over the system itself.
 
Thomas Jefferson argued that citizens should be able to express their consent to their system every generation. This was rejected by the other founding fathers on the grounds that the prospect of a change in the system every 19 years would not provide the stability in the basic rules of government that people also required. Change in the basic rules was deliberately made difficult. The argument thus shifted to the idea that people should apply a standard of measurement against which the need for changes in the system could be assessed and made only when necessary.
 
Perhaps the best-known standard of measurement for the system of government is for citizens to ask whose interest is being served by the system of government. The role of the citizen is to question whether the system is being operated to the benefit of the many or in the interests of a few. The question of ‘who benefits’ was originally a reformist tool to be used against established vested interests and traditional elites. It is the approach associated with Bentham and the utilitarians. Nowadays it also applies to the new elites who have the money to sway elections or who have an ‘insider track’ in lobbying for change in the centres of political decision making.
 
A further well-known standard of measurement is centred on fairness. Democracies have to be fair in order to gain consent. Citizens thus have a right to demand reform when income and wealth differences become entrenched as they now are across the democratic world.
 
A more abstract way of measuring consent is to look at who is exercising power over others and how far coercive power can be reduced or minimised. In the early days of representative government, the concern was about defending against the power of ‘factions’ – the wealthy commercial or landed interests who could subvert the rules of the market or government to serve their own purposes. In today’s world ‘faction’ can be defined in terms of the power exercised by billionaires or high tech. companies.
 
If the answer to any of these standards of measurement is negative – that the system is not working to the benefit of the many, or is not fair, or is giving disproportionate power to a privileged few or those with an inside track, then the active citizen has a duty to look for opportunities for constitutional change in the rules of the system itself. The aim may be, for example, to ensure that assemblies act more as mirrors of the electorate, or that both elected representatives and members of judiciaries are subject to term limitations, or that limits are set on election expenses, or that the rules against market abuse are enforced more rigorously.
 
The guard rails
 
Even if active citizens want to see change in the system of government, the process of actually achieving change is notoriously difficult because existing structures will be defended by those with something to lose. The focus thus switches also to strengthening permanent guard rails against the abuse of power.
 
Independent judiciary
It has long been accepted in democracies that a critical guardrail against the abuse of power by legislatures, or executives or factions that might try to control either, is provided by an independent judiciary charged with safeguarding the constitutional order itself. The difficulty is that the growth of judicial review has extended to cover much of ordinary politics as well as the basic rules themselves. Supreme Courts whether in the US or Europe are no longer seen as neutral keepers of the rules but part of ‘linked ecologies’ of interest.
 
Epistemic knowledge
More recently it has become accepted that independent epistemic agencies also provide a guard rail against the claims of legislatures and executives. By drawing on knowledge and information outside politics they can question the claims of governments to know what they are doing. They stand for non-hierarchical decision making in matters of public policy.
 
The economic constitution
In the historical fight against collectivism from both the right and the left a further type of guard rail was proposed in terms of extending the idea of a constitution to include rules governing economic management as well as market competition rules. The widely accepted element in this approach is found in the support given to independent central banks. The more controversial rules concern fiscal rules stipulating the need for balanced budgets and limits on government debt. In current circumstances the need for fiscal guard rails seems particularly relevant.
 
None of these guard rails can operate effectively without public support. In the US the independence of the Supreme Court has been undermined, the role of epistemic agencies has come under attack and government debt continues to grow from 56% of GDP in 1990 to over 122% in 2025. (according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis). In Germany, the home of conceptualising the economic constitution, government debt has grown from about 41% of GDP to around 64% over roughly the same period. In the UK, government debt has risen from 28% of GDP to 95% from 1990 (when Margaret Thatcher lost office) to 2025.
 
Conclusion
 
By whatever measure is applied, by the test of who benefits, the test of fairness, or the ability to exercise power over others, democratic systems of government are not working well. The active citizen needs to engage with every aspect – with combatting the negative narratives of identity politics and also with a readiness to change the system and strengthen its guard-rails.