Abstract
Theories about the democratic state should ideally deal with the state's smallest unit, the individual citizen, and with the institutions which support central public values. Yet there exists a serious gap between theories of the welfare state (a stateform which portends to be democratic) as we know it today and democratic theory, both on a theoretical level and on the level of empirical operationatization. This poses problems for the study of citizen ship, especially in the mature highly differentiated welfare states of Scan dinavia where recent democratization policies have added an aspect of citizenship, namely participatory rights and material entitlements, to almost all relationships between the state and the individual within a great variety of institutional settings These have been added on to older individual rights which protect the individual's autonomy against state intervention The welfare state literature, to the extent that it deals with individual citizens, treats those aspects of citizenship which are related to social policy entitlements. Democratic theories and empirical studies of democratic poli tics emphasize the participatory aspects of citizenship Any adequate account of contemporary citizenship in Scandinavia must include all these dimensions in order to grasp the interplay between material rights, multi-level par ticipation and political identities As states have changed so have the content and meaning of citizenship changed for the individuals living within their borders Yet most political theories do not attempt to combine the answers to central questions of modern citizenship 1. Who participates in the institutional life of society and the state? 2 What are the rights and duties attached to this participation? (questions to which the legal literature has addressed itself without being integrated into the social science literature). 3. Which values and resources are institutionalized, defended and distributed by public authonties? Congruence across institutions and between the three levels of society - the individual, the organizational and the institutional ones - can therefore only be assessed with great difficulty Yet from the point of view of democratic citizenship such congruence should be a normative as well as a practical prerequisite in order for citizens to make use of their rights, and live up to their duties as citizens, and in order to enable citizens to identify with the political system on ill three levels.
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