The Evolution of Citizenship Norms among Scandinavian Adolescents, 1999–2009

Abstract

In the recent debate about changing citizenship norms in advanced democracies, Scandinavian countries are often considered the front-runners of developing a new kind of engaged citizenship. The majority of recent empirical scholarship in this field, however, has focused on the United States. In this article we use latent class analysis to ascertain whether the ideal types of engaged citizenship and duty-based citizenship norms are relevant concepts for adolescents in Scandinavia, and whether there are significant changes in these norms between 1999 and 2009. The findings confirm that engaged and duty-based citizens can be clearly identified and that engaged citizenship norms are becoming more prevalent. We also, find, however, that engaged and duty-based norms are not the only norms identified in the analysis, and that important differences are evident in the background characteristics of those ascribing to different citizen norms that contradict expectations in the literature. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for changing citizenship norms in advanced democracies, including the potential implications of these changing norms for political behavior.

Young adults’ conceptions of ‘good’ citizenship behaviours: a latent class analysis

“…Their characterisation may also be helpful to promote certain activities among those who are less prone to participate, which can be useful for raising the levels of participation. On the one hand, the study thus asks what the socio-demographic characteristics of those young adults are, as those may be relevant predictors of perceived norms of citizenship (Hooghe et al, 2016;Oser & Hooghe, 2013;Reichert, 2016b;Straughn & Andriot, 2011). On the other hand, this research wants to know how distinct perceptions of good citizenship relate to actual civic and political participation.…”

Culture, Citizenship Norms, and Political Participation: Empirical Evidence from Taiwan

“…As the most notable study, Dalton (2008) focuses on engaged citizenship in the United States and speculates that the findings from there can be generalized for other advanced democracies over time. Moreover, Dalton's (2008) argument has been supported by studies investigating the cases of Eastern Europe (Coffé and van der Lippe, 2010) and Scandinavian countries (Oser and Hooghe, 2013). It is believed that more empirical research, covering countries across different geographical regions and cultural dimensions, is necessary to obtain a better understanding of the generalizability of the research into the changing of citizenship norms and the impact on various forms of political participation.…”

“…It has been well documented that conventional types of political participation, such as voting and engagement in political party activities, have declined in recent years in the United States and many Western advanced democracies (Brady et al ., 1995; Inglehart and Catterberg, 2002; Flanagan and Lee, 2003; Blais and Rubenson, 2013). A more recent argument for this trend, however, suggests that to fully explain the solidification of a democratic system, it is necessary to shift attention to the changing norms of citizenship, instead of simply focusing on the conventional type of political participation such as voter turnout (Dalton, 2008; Inglehart, 2008; Oser and Hooghe, 2013). Empirical evidence from the United States and Western advanced democracies argues that when citizenship norms are appropriately examined, it indicates that even though turnout rates are lower in elections, people are still strongly engaged in various forms of political participation in terms of their citizenship norms.…”

“…Indeed, previous literature, such as Inglehart and Catterberg (2002), Copeland (2014), Dalton (2008), Dalton et al . (2010), van Deth (2009), Bolzendahl and Coffé (2013), and Oser and Hooghe (2013) emphasizes that far from being politically disengaged, people who have ‘engaged citizenship’ norms are usually supportive of elite-challenging political activities, such as protesting, signing petitions, or boycotting products for political or ethical reasons. Moreover, these studies also show that people who have embraced citizenship norms tend to have stronger post-modern values in supporting political engagement that concerns issues such as environmental conservation and human rights.…”

“…Some other studies in this field have also shown that the main reason for explaining the decline in electoral turnout is the generational changes in values (Blais and Rubenson, 2013). This implies that, in order to better recognize the pattern of their future political engagement, targeting young people's attitude toward normative values is necessary (Kittilson and Dalton, 2011; Blais and Rubenson, 2013; Oser and Hooghe, 2013). In particular, with the development of the Internet and new forms of media, previous studies have found that media use has strong effects on civic culture and political engagement (Kittilson and Dalton, 2011; Gil de Zúñiga and Valenzuela, 2011; Swigger, 2013; Weinstein, 2014).…”