Stratified Citizens: Conceptualizing Civic Capital in Mediatized Societies

Abstract

While there are many ways to understand citizenship in terms of what constituents (should) do, think, feel, and say, there is a felt absence of a perspective that factors in the social reasons for how people enact citizenship and the role of media in enacting such forms of citizenship. Based on a review of key studies of citizenship in audience research and political science, this study introduces a Bourdieusian perspective to examine citizenship in mediatized societies. We argue for two main advantages to this approach. First, it cuts across scholarly silos and scrutinizes the civic habitus of people as it unfolds across both mediated and non-mediated life. Citizenship is thus seen as a complex interplay of online and offline practices that vary for agents across the social space. Second, this approach is attentive to dimensions of social inequality and power, emphasizing how the many citizenship practices in the modern era are situated in a vertically stratified social world with a distinct symbolic order. Linking this to the concepts of symbolic power and dominance, we develop the notion of civic capital to illuminate how certain forms of citizenship practices, mostly those available to the affluent strata, are elevated as correct expressions of legitimate citizenship, whereas others are frowned upon.

Introduction

Putting the demos in democracy, citizens form the basis of the least-worst form of government that humankind has ever attempted, as Winston Churchill famously stated. Hence, there is a rich and expanding body of literature on what constitute legitimate citizenship practices in various models of democracy (see Held, 2006, for an overview). Although there are many ways to understand citizenship in terms of what constituents (should) do, think, feel, and say, there is a felt absence of a perspective that factors in the social reasons for how people enact citizenship and the role of the media in enacting such forms of citizenship. Why do some make political YouTube videos, others demonstrate or organize in social movements, and yet others only vote and stay somewhat updated on current affairs? Which constitutive sociological patterns underlie different types of civic behaviors? What model of evaluation should we use when assessing them? These questions are important in a time of political unrest, social fragmentation, and deep mediatization (Hepp, 2020), when the stability of democracy is continuously contested and the role of new forms of media is evident (the yellow vests in France being one example, the attack on the US Capitol being another).

Spurred on by such challenges, this study introduces a Bourdieusian perspective to examine modern citizenship. This approach has two main advantages. First, it cuts across scholarly silos and scrutinizes the civic habitus of people as it unfolds across both mediated and non-mediated life. Invoking the notion of the “unity of habitus” (Bourdieu, 1998; Hovden, 2023; Hovden & Moe, 2017), citizenship is seen as a complex interplay of practices, including formal and informal participation, (social) media usage and consumption, and deliberation practices—that is, a coherent repertoire of online and offline citizenship practices that vary for agents across the social space. Second, this approach is attentive to dimensions of social inequality and power, emphasizing how the many citizenship practices in the modern era are situated in an already existing, vertically stratified social world with a distinct symbolic order (Bourdieu, 1984). Thus, citizenship practices neither carry the same social significance nor are equally available to everybody. In this line of thought, agents’ dispositions, including the ways they enact citizenship, act as symbolic distinctions between strata and correspond to their positions and resources (or lack thereof) in society. Through this lens, citizenship functions as a mode of social distinction, with representations of “good” and “bad” citizens constructed on the basis of a tacit framework of established symbolic structures that naturalize and hide the fundamental social inequality at hand. Linking this to the notions of symbolic dominance and power (Bourdieu & Thompson, 1991), we conceptualize the notion of civic capital to understand how certain forms of practice, mostly those available to affluent strata, are elevated as correct expressions of legitimate citizenship, whereas others are frowned upon.

This article unfolds this argument in three steps. First, we review key works on citizenship in political science and media and communication studies and argue that citizenship is predominantly linked to either the formal political sphere or daily (and increasingly digital) domains. However, perspectives on social inequality and power are in the minority, and mediated and unmediated forms of citizenship are seldom considered in relation to each other. Second, this study introduces the theoretical foundations of a Bourdieusian approach to citizenship and reviews key empirical contributions using this framework. This constitutes an interdisciplinary approach to citizenship not confined to scrutiny of (social) media practices or traditional, political participation in themselves but encompassing a relational and stratificational analysis of the interplays between them as they unfold in everyday physical and digital life. Third, this study develops the notion of civic capital and discusses it in relation to the notion of populism using an empirical example.

Citizenship as Political Participation and Deliberation

A common starting point for more recent notions of citizenship is the seminal work of T. H. Marshall and Bottomore (1992). According to Marshall, modern citizenship resides on the fundamental idea that the nation state provides and ensures the civil, political, and social rights of its constituents, who in turn must take care of their civic duties. Citizens thus need to engage with formal politics and participate in the exercise of political power by voting for, or standing as, representatives of institutions with political authority. Similarly, Verba and Almond (1963) suggested that democracies need a civic culture characterized by allegiance to the national government and modest levels of political participation. This early literature conceptualized citizenship around formal political acts, providing examples of practices such as voting, campaigning, joining political parties, and contacting politicians and public officials, which are also prevalent in more recent research agendas in political science and communication studies (see, for example, Prior & Bougher, 2018; Vaccari & Valeriani, 2021; Willeck & Mendelberg, 2022).

While some have considered these normative expectations for citizens ideal, others have been skeptical for various reasons. Some have demanded less of citizens, such as Schumpeter (2008), who argued for a minimalist model of democracy (also called “elite-democracy”) in which citizens are limited to the act of voting in elections. Schumpeter stated that political processes should be left to experts and politicians, who have the sufficient knowledge to manage them. Conversely, others have demanded more. Proponents of participatory models of democracy expect people to be active in civic and public life, doing volunteer work and engaging in local communities (Strömbäck, 2005). According to Putnam (2000), “Citizenship is not a spectator sport” (p. 341). These perspectives revolve around the dichotomy of passive versus active citizens in relation to formal political participation.

In addition to the focus on the actions of citizens, proponents of deliberative democracy theory emphasize the importance of communication and political debate. The most well-known perspective comes from Habermas’ (1991) seminal work on the public sphere in the bourgeoisie society of the 18th century. Habermas argued for the importance of individuals coming together to discuss and deliberate on issues in an informed and rational way, with the goal of reaching a consensus on the best course of action on a given topic. This stipulates a certain view of citizens, who should strive to be politically interested and engaged. Thus, they need to be able to locate relevant information and use it in an impartial method of deliberating, which should ideally be a part of their daily lives. Habermas’ idea has been criticized by many. For instance, Fraser (1990) argued that the conception of the public sphere brought forward by Habermas needs to include “the interests and issues that bourgeois masculinist ideology labels ‘private’ and treats as inadmissible” (p. 77). Consequently, Habermas has revised his theory on several occasions (Calhoun, 2011; Habermas, 2006, 2022).

Citizenship as Everyday Mediated Orientation

Regarding public sphere deliberation, the role of the media is undeniably pivotal in providing information to citizens to cultivate them as knowledgeable political subjects (Fenton, 2010). The long-standing tradition of media effect studies examines how the media can set the public agenda and influence the attention and deliberation of citizens, thus playing “an important part in shaping political reality” (McCombs & Shaw, 1972, p. 176). This strand of research has been met with critiques from scholars who challenge the underlying notion of the audience as passive and homogeneous recipients of news content (Hartley, 2018). Katz et al. (1973), as proponents of the uses and gratifications theory, famously suggested that we should shift our attention away from what the media does to people to what people do with the media, emphasizing the importance of studying the motivations of conscious individuals in terms of media consumption.

Subsequently, the cultural turn in audience studies, led by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and especially Stuart Hall, placed a substantial analytical focus on the micro-processes of citizenship formation through the media (Schrøder, 2013) as they play out in everyday life. Hall (1980) argued that several dominant readings of a given news text are possible and that readers interpret a text differently from the way the producer “encoded” it. Building on the work of Hall, Morley (1980) linked decoding to the socioeconomic class of audiences. Focusing on class differentiation, Fiske (1987) proposed that the pleasure of popular television for working-class viewers resides in the offer of symbolic resistance, through identification with underdog protagonists, to the hegemonic power of the system. As such, the cultural turn emphasized how audiences with different cultural and social backgrounds actively construct meaning through media and use it to find their identity, which is useful for a conceptualization of citizenship in the mediatized age (see also Dahlgren, 2006).

This understanding was also promoted by Schudson (1998), who convincingly argued that the ideal of the politically omniscient “informed citizen” needs to be revised to better match the capabilities and resources of ordinary people. In his view, citizens are akin to parents watching their children at the community pool; they “are not gathering information; they are keeping an eye on the scene. They look inactive, but they are poised for action if action is required” (Schudson, 1998, p. 311). Building on the concept coined by Keane (2011), Schudson suggested viewing citizens as monitorial, stipulating a form of “remote . . . yet constant vigilance” (Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2018, p. 238).

Later, Couldry et al. (2010) introduced the concept of public connection in their seminal 2005–2008 studies in the United Kingdom of media consumption and public engagement. They argued for a broader definition of “politics” and defined “public connection” as the connection (via the media) to public issues beyond purely private concerns (Couldry et al., 2010). The notion of “public connection” was further developed by Kaun (2012), who defined public connection as sets of civic experiences rather than predefined practices, focusing particularly on public connection as an orientation and less on the formal political acts. Following Mouffe’s concept of “radical democratic citizenship,” Kaun (2012) emphasized the importance of agonistic struggles and power relations to citizenship practices and argued that the conflictual perspective in the theoretical framework proposed by Couldry et al. (2010) was underdeveloped, indicating that what constitutes common concerns is a struggle and constant negotiation.

In sum, these considerations show how citizenship has been conceptualized differently across different academic fields, from more formal political acts to less formal and identity-driven performative experiences. We now turn to recent times, where the technological developments of the last two or three decades have expanded the channels for citizenship to an unprecedented degree. While the private and public domains are increasingly blurred, making formal and everyday perspectives on citizenship harder to separate, the normative evaluation of citizenship practices continues, with special emphasis on either great promise or great despair in modern media.

Citizenship in the Digital World

For providing infrastructure that could supplement or even displace the one-way communication monopoly of mass media, the Internet was once celebrated in some academic circles as having emancipatory potential. Being accessible to everybody, it could empower the civic culture of citizens and enable deliberation, participation, and information-seeking on an unprecedented scale (Benkler, 2006; Jenkins, 2006). In a time where deep mediatization links all the elements of our social world to “digital media and their underlying infrastructures” (Hepp, 2020, p. 5), people can arguably be highly creative and personal about their citizenship (Friedland & Wells, 2018). This plays out at both the macro- and micro-levels, with peers being collectively mobilized and individuals enabled to actualize themselves through various platforms offered by the digital world. Following the emergence of new digital affordances for participation through the “convergence culture” (Jenkins, 2006), investigations of participatory forms of citizenship arose. Thorson (2015) applied the notion of “do-it-yourself” citizenship, in which young people can assemble different elements that resonate with their preferred ways of expressing and participating in their political agendas. Furthermore, Hartley (2018) proposed the self-organized, user-created, and ludic conception of “silly citizenship,” in which political participation is expressed through playful activities and performances in YouTube dance videos. These traditions have increasingly envisioned media audiences as active rather than passive recipients of information, suggesting processes of individual and subjective decoding of content in the algorithmic setting (Lomborg & Kapsch, 2020). This occurs when audiences are not merely reading news media but adopting intervention strategies in the form of user-generated content, becoming so-called “produsers” (Bruns, 2008; Bruns & Highfield, 2016).

However, since the mid-90s, scholarly work on the digital divide has drawn attention to the problematic divide between people who have access to and can use digital media and those who do not, with the latter subsequently being cut off from partaking in an essential part of modern public life (Hargittai & Hinnant, 2008). Furthermore, the opaque algorithms of social media are seen by some as a threat to the public sphere and the citizens who engage in it. Gillespie (2014) has argued for the potential loss of citizens’ personal autonomy as publics are now calculated, and Zuboff (2019) has strongly advocated against social media and big tech as exponents of “surveillance capitalism” which is said to erode the foundations of democracy (see also Hindman, 2018). In the view of a considerable part of the research community, human and civic agency is challenged as we are filtered into bubbles (Pariser, 2011) or echo chambers (Colleoni et al., 2014). This relates to data colonizing every aspect of human life (Couldry & Mejias, 2019) and the web allowing for acts of “dark participation” (Quandt, 2018) in the shadier parts of the online world. Moreover, Habermas (2022) argued that social media are threatening to undermine the economic basis of traditional newspaper publishers and could also distort users’ perceptions of the public sphere (p. 146). Similarly, Iyengar et al. (2019) scrutinized the increase in polarization online, which leaves society divided between political factions and between scientific experts and citizens.

Toward a Bourdieusian Approach to Citizenship in Mediatized Societies

Previous research has revealed at least two predominant positions. First, some scholars ground their notions of citizenship in a link to formal political spheres and their assessments of citizenship on matters such as political participation, including voting, campaigning, and volunteering, and political deliberation. This is commonly informed by reading or watching political news. This perspective is present in both older and newer works in political science, communication, and media effect studies. In contrast, other scholars consider citizenship a practice fully embedded in everyday life, in which political activity is not confined to certain formal realms; rather, it exists as a ubiquitous creative potentiality in human life, often expressed in and across a multitude of media formats. This view is predominantly found among scholars of cultural studies and audience research.

While it is hard to underestimate the value of these contributions, we would argue for the presence of a few caveats. First, we are critical toward the monolithic focus on “politics” prevalent in the former position. According to Hovden (2023), this perspective neglects how social inequality divides the public sphere and its citizenry into “worlds apart.” Hovden’s analysis demonstrated that politics are primarily reserved for those who reside in an “elite public,” whereas ordinary people not only have limited access to political matters (see also Verba & Nie, 1987) but, using a Bourdieusian logic, are also socially predisposed to neglect such matters (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 400). If relations to “politics” across and beyond media are the sole scale on which democracy and citizenship are evaluated, we operate with normative expectations for citizenship that belong to the paradise of ideas in which the essentialization of the citizen blurs how ordinary people’s democratic involvement occurs in the real world (Hovden & Moe, 2017; Ljunggren, 2021, p. 353; Moe et al., 2019).

This view is more developed in the cultural studies tradition. The Birmingham School scrutinized practices of everyday citizenship formation, with an emphasis on patterns of social inequality (Hall, 1980; Morley, 1980). Moreover, several scholars have underlined the importance of investigating power relations and resources when assessing the nexus between the media, culture, and citizenship (Butsch, 2008; Dahlgren, 2006; Kaun, 2012). By and large, however, we argue that the social stratification perspective remains somewhat underdeveloped in the field of audience studies. Furthermore, it is often media-centric, that is, not attentive to how mediated practices link to unmediated practices. While recognizing the importance of studying the media, particularly social media, in relation to modern citizenship, we agree with Hovden and Moe (2017), who argued that there is potential in examining the link between patterns of cross-media use and other relevant practices to “cultural works outside the media and engagement in political and civic organizations” (p. 392). In the following, we explore how a Bourdieusian perspective on citizenship would approach these questions.

Stratified Citizenship: Theoretical Foundations and Empirical Applications

To grasp how citizenship can be viewed through a stratificational lens, we briefly introduce two core concepts of Bourdieusian sociology: capital and habitus, which represent two sides of the same coin. The former refers to social structures and citizens’ placement within them, whereas the latter refers to the principle through which subjective sense-making is organized; while agents undoubtedly “construct their vision of the world,” they do so “under structural constraints” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 18). Unlike in the mainstream understanding of the word, “capital” indicates more than just purely economic entities. Rather, capital can manifest as virtually any form of resource or competence, provided it is recognized as such by the appropriate people (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Broady, 1997). In sports, agile and strong bodies are viewed as relevant capital; in art, the right taste and use of language to express both taste and distaste are relevant capital. ¹ When capital and those who possess it are deemed worthy (enough), they obtain symbolic value, which can be used as “a power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world, and thereby, action on the world and the world itself” (Bourdieu & Thompson, 1991, p. 170). Thus, when one social practice is consecrated, the relational perspective stipulates that another must be condemned as profane for the distinction to be meaningful in a social world of differences and distinctions. Symbolic power and dominance by one stratum are therefore accompanied by symbolic violence imposed upon others in which the practices of some strata (usually the most underprivileged) are deemed less valuable—in this case, by stipulating strict criteria for what constitute legitimate ways of being a citizen and instilling this social construct as normal and natural for both the dominant and the dominated (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).

The closely linked concept of habitus can be seen as the mental structure through which social agents apprehend the world. Fundamentally, this system of dispositions, or way of orienting oneself in the world, is also “essentially the product of the internalization of the structures of that world” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 18; see also 1990). This is similar to Kaun’s (2012) “experiences,” which are described as historically embodied; however, in Bourdieu’s view, these orientations are understood as specific forms of taste related to one’s position in the overall social space. The surrounding structures are inscribed physically in individuals, who are bearers of social bodies according to the societal surroundings they live in. In turn, these surroundings are deemed natural and fitting as a form of practical common sense despite being historically contingent social constructs. Structural conditions, forms of capital, and positions in the social space are intertwined with subjective perceptions of reality. According to Bourdieu (1998), “What the worker eats, and especially the way he eats it, the sport he practices and the way he practices it, his political opinions and the way he expresses them are systematically different from the industrial owner’s corresponding activities” (p. 8). We may add that the way the workers enact their citizenship is socially stratified and linked to social position and capital composition.

Rather than being subjective and personal, as in many of the audience studies reviewed above, enactments of citizenship would be viewed by Bourdieu as corresponding with social position and enabling agents to perform distinctive practices that express affinity with or divergence from different clusters in the social hierarchy. Agents distinguish themselves in relation to others by the distinctions they make. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 6). By adhering to a specific taste in civic practices and the related media consumption patterns, we can analytically explore not only how people differ but also the socio-hierarchical dimensions between these differences.

Types of civic “taste” can be expressed as tendencies to engage in formal political participation (e.g., for the older and better-educated segments) or newer and more informal forms, such as urban gardening and hashtag activism (e.g., for the younger, more digitally oriented segments). Applying such taste as a mode of distinction entails how some forms of civic engagement are seen as legitimate, whereas others are frowned upon (e.g., rational deliberation on politics vs heated social media discussions on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic). Through this lens, we become attuned to how different positions and capital compositions cultivate different forms of civic habitus, which affect how citizens engage in the mediated and unmediated public spheres. Dimensions of civic “taste” could be norms, values, and participation in relation to existing and formal democratic institutions as well as the manifold of practices highlighted by cultural, everyday citizenship approaches.

Although they are relatively scarce, some empirical analyses have built on this overall framework when assessing how people enact their citizenship across social strata. In the US context, Friedland et al. (2007) showed how capital composition is linked to citizenship practices; the most affluent read leading outlets, such as The New York Times, donate money to environmental causes and write letters to the editors but are somewhat removed from day-to-day civic practices, whereas a middle-class group of white-collar service workers prefer broadcast over printed news and constitute “the foot soldiers of civil society,” deeply engaged in supporting and improving their local communities (p. 42). Furthermore, the cluster associated with the lowest shares of capital and rural life settings prefers country music and distinctively reads Playboy while appearing “the most disengaged” in terms of civic activities (Friedland et al., 2007, p. 45). Likewise, Laurison (2012) conducted a study in the United States and argued that the volume of capital structures influences political behavior, as people relate to politics “with the sense that they are not socially legitimated producers of political opinions: they lack political competence” (Laurison, 2012, p. 54; see also Bergström, 2012). In a Danish context, Harrits (2013) explored the association between economic and cultural notions of class and political practices and found that the total amount of capital is parallel to the total amount of political participation and political resources, with political discussions particularly attracting the cultural upper and middle classes. Furthermore, while not putting the main emphasis on citizenship, several scholars have emphasized the correlation between political attitudes, cultural lifestyles, and class (see, for example, Faber et al., 2012, or Savage, 2015). Emphasizing mediated practices and class in the digital age, Lindell and Hovden (2017) drew on Bourdieusian sociology and provided a strong argument for viewing audiences in Sweden as fragmented, as class plays a structuring role in media consumption in an otherwise high-choice media environment (see also Lindell, 2018).

In sum, empirical scrutiny of citizenship using a Bourdieusian framework has gained some ground in the last two decades. However, apart from Friedland et al. (2007), previous studies either neglect the role of mediated citizenship practices or focus solely on it, failing to associate it with formal political participation and various offline modes of civic engagement. Such an integration between unmediated and mediated forms of citizenship is more developed in the work of Jan-Fredrik Hovden, who has scrutinized correlations between cross-media consumption and usage, broader cultural lifestyle patterns, and social class in a Norwegian context (Hovden, 2023; Hovden & Moe, 2017; Moe et al., 2019). Overall, his studies have revealed clear distinctions between the public lifestyles of the affluent, dominating classes versus the lower strata of the dominant classes and their media consumption. The former are deeply engaged with political matters and deliberation. They read legacy newspapers and trust key democratic institutions, whereas the less affluent tend to favor local over international news, generally read fewer newspapers, watch more television (often on commercial channels), and are not drawn to political debate and deliberation (Moe et al., 2019).

Hovden (2023) denotes his main analytical object as the “public lifestyles” of citizens, that is, the preferences and interests, habits, resources, and attitudes relevant to the use and monitoring of the public sphere for citizens across both social strata and online and offline forms of engagement. The notion of habitus plays a key role in this understanding, as it underlines “the idea that our dispositions are never limited to one type of activity or social sphere (the unity of habitus)” which “entail[s] that our relation to the public cannot be compartmentalized as a specific aspect of our life” (Hovden & Moe, 2017, p. 399). In line with this argument, we argue that the Bourdieusian approach to citizenship presented above cuts across scholarly silos and scrutinizes the civic habitus of people as a coherent repertoire of stratified citizenship practices across the realms of digital, mediated, and physical life. Our next step is to theoretically synthesize the main empirical conclusions from the abovementioned contributions into a notion of civic capital. We would argue that the main story here differs from the usual perception of democracy as a societal institution that secures a basic equality among constituents; rather, the Bourdieusian framework highlights social struggles and tacit forms of domination built into the dominant perceptions of citizenship.

Civic Capital and Symbolic Power

We proceed in grounding the notion of civic capital by briefly reviewing the adjacent yet conceptually contrasting concept of civic competence. As noted by Dahl (1992), the usual definition of such competence refers to how citizens should have “both knowledge of the ‘public good’ and also a robust and sustained desire to achieve it; that is, they should possess ‘civic virtue’” (p. 45; see also Brinkmann, 2018; Verba & Almond, 1963). Verba and Nie (1987) noted that differences in terms of such civic competences are linked to the unequal distribution of economic and educational resources. Harrits (2005), from a Bourdieusian perspective, argued that this line of thought is limited, as it focuses excessively on the intentions and resources of citizens and neglects the dimension of a practical, non-reflexive, and embodied civic habitus. As such, it can only grasp the political and civic relations of those affluent in cultural capital, who are socially disposed to attain the ascribed ideals of civic virtue (Harrits, 2005, p. 141). This critique is somewhat similar to a predominant critique of media effects and literacy theory, where the underlying logic stipulates how the consumption of certain media, such as news, can be seen as a “magic bullet” that can cultivate audiences as citizens, neglecting how this would occur in actual, everyday life (Hall, 1980).

While civic competence refers to commonly acknowledged attributes that people can have differing amounts of, thereby embodying civic virtue to differing degrees, civic capital underlines that such attributes originate from social struggles and asymmetrical power relations between social strata, resembling Kaun’s (2012) critique of Couldry et al. (2010). While Bourdieu (1984) did not write explicitly on citizenship, Distinction contained a powerful analysis of how different people are able to engage in the political sphere (see also Bourdieu, 2000, p. 164). Bourdieu (1984) argued that the propensity to speak politically is strictly proportionate to the sense of having the right to speak, thus rewarding the habitual dispositions of those rich in cultural capital and giving them a clear edge in terms of political agency. Conversely, empirical analyses indicated that lower strata tend to answer “don’t know” in survey questionnaires or choose the non-response option (Bourdieu, 1984). Bourdieu argued that we must be critical of the notion of “personal opinion” and its pivotal role in democracy. Voicing a political opinion requires a certain amount of skill (or capital) and habitus, which fosters a relation to politics characterized by both interest and a feeling of confidence and entitlement. As such, Bourdieu asserted a conflictual view of citizenship that emphasizes the tacit power relations of the democratic system.

Inscribed in the theories previewed earlier (especially those originating in political science), we notice certain traits that are elevated as constituting the building blocks of proper citizenship: voting, civic participation (such as volunteering), political deliberation, staying up to date, and trusting and respecting key democratic institutions all are prevalent citizenship traits across different models of democracy (Strömbäck, 2005). We would argue that they constitute distinct examples of what dominant civic capital might look like across Western democracies today. While they correlate with other forms of capital—deliberation requires linguistic capital; decoding the often complex media stories about politics or the economy requires educational capital; volunteering demands some form of economic liberty (who else can work for free?)—they are, in themselves, traits that can be used to tacitly legitimize proper and improper ways of being a citizen, as they mistake the principal equality of citizens for the practical equality of their lived experience with civic culture.

According to Savage et al. (2005), an asset can serve as capital in a Bordieusian sense if (1) it is seen as legitimate and desirable by others, (2) it can be converted to other forms of valid capital, and (3) it is linked to patterns of domination between strata. Such theoretical criteria should, if possible, be addressed through empirical scrutiny. Adding to the studies reviewed above, we briefly consider the survey analysis presented by Sivertsen (2023), who analyzed mediated and unmediated citizenship practices, which clearly correlated with the capital of the respondents, in the liberal democracy of Denmark. Among the affluent at the top, the respondents expressed a form of civic taste in harmony with many of the established citizenship ideals; they actively participated in civic society, did volunteer work, and donated to charity causes. Furthermore, they were politically engaged and deliberative, stayed updated about current affairs, and trusted key institutions and their fellow citizens. In the realm of digital media, they were members of Facebook groups concerned with environmental issues and followed journalists, intellectuals, and politicians on various platforms. Conversely, among the lower strata, there was a clear indication of distaste for the official realm of politics. They expressed a distinct lack of interest in politics and deliberation and did not trust the state media (exemplified, in the questionnaire, by the Danish Health Authority, which is worth noting, as this survey was conducted between January and March 2021, while Covid-19 roared in Denmark). In the digital realm, they were members of Facebook groups focusing on pets and cooking and followed the pages of celebrity culture personas, stand-up comedians, and mainstream popstars.

How can such stratificational patterns be interpreted by applying the notion of civic capital? To start with, it is evident that some strata in this case recognize practices such as political deliberation or consumption of hard news as valid and worth pursuing. With some being more socially predisposed to partake in them than others, these practices are scarce and facilitate a way for agents to claim that their enactment of citizenship is legitimate and thus distinctive from those who fail to aspire to the same ideal. Second, while the survey data did not directly determine whether civic capital may be converted to, for example, economic or social capital, the theoretical argument would be that playing by the rules of liberal democracy in liberal democracy grants access to favorable positions that can benefit those who know how to do it. Convincing a political opponent through rational deliberation may increase the chance that the issue at hand gains broader political support, and as such, civic capital can be converted to a form of political power (which, again, can be converted to, for example, economic power). Third, we would argue that such practices indeed are linked to patterns of domination. Following the above examples, the lower strata are seemingly disinterested in politics and distrustful toward the society they live in. Upon further scrutiny, they do, however, have clear political positionings, such as following right-wing politician Inger Støjberg on social media, agreeing on general populist viewpoints, such as “Denmark First,” and distrusting key democratic institutions (Sivertsen, 2023). This raises the question: Why do people with clear political positionings feel so distanced from politics? The answer, we believe, has to do precisely with patterns of domination in which some civic tastes and preferences are deemed unworthy in the symbolic order of society. And as an act of symbolic power, this has been internalized in the agents of the lower strata, who thus “refuse, what they are refused” (Bourdieu, 1984).

Analogous to Bourdieu’s critique of Kant’s elevation of the cultural judgments of the social elites to a general aesthetic principle (Bourdieu, 1984), the political and civic positionings among the affluent are seemingly elevated symbolically as the legitimate (and sole) ways of being a proper citizen, which exemplifies why civic capital could prove a fruitful notion. If we define civic capital as the assets people can apply in an attempt to influence society in a normative direction that they deem right as citizens, it seems evident that this form of capital is not equally available to all. This, in turn, gives us the tools to critically assess the (in this case) liberal democratic citizen image. While liberal democracy should arguably ensure basic equality among constituents, Sivertsen (2023) suggested that it may hide a form of inequality, a form of democratic dominance, in which only some citizenship practices are legitimate, namely the practices available to the affluent. This view can be used to disqualify the civic habitus or civic taste of the lower strata, labeling them anything from passive to belligerent and, more fundamentally, undemocratic and thus not worthy of serious engagement.

Linking this concept to the recent surge of populism in the Western world, we argue that studies that emphasize differences in socioeconomic resources (Engler & Weisstanner, 2021; Rodrik, 2021) and social media (Engesser et al., 2017) as drivers of populism and social fragmentation could benefit from the notion of civic capital. In addition to scrutinizing material inequalities and media affordances, civic capital facilitates a critical look at the symbolic dimensions of citizenship and inquires whether the dominant groups of democracy, including the scholarly community, have defined citizenship in a way that misrecognizes certain social strata (e.g., those displaying skepticism about immigration, the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, or the (mis)doings of the political and financial “elite”). Therefore, there appear to be underlying tensions in liberal democracy; on one hand, equality and freedom for all is the main purpose, but, on the other hand, opinions and political acts outside of the normative status quo are frowned upon as undemocratic. This is not an argument for total relativism in terms of values, where everything is a clash of interests. However, we believe that the symbolic construction of citizenship in liberal democracy has caveats, that the social fragmentation around the Western world is partly a symptom of this, and that critically assessing the dominant symbolic categorizations through the proposed notion of civic capital might lead to fruitful insights on fostering inclusivity.

Thus, we do not suggest leaving behind the valuable insights of citizenship research as reviewed throughout this article. Rather, we argue for the value of supplementing them with the perspective of civic capital, thus reformulating previous inquiries and attuning them to the conflictual and power-based realities of society. For instance, how do we define news? Is news in its predominant form skewed toward the interests of the elite, and how does this affect ordinary people’s relation to it? Is it possible to achieve public connection beyond the news and through more informal channels, such as through Facebook groups or similar online spaces (see Sivertsen & Thomsen, 2023)? What constitute established truths in our society, and how can we deal with people who reject them in a manner that does not itself reject them? Can political participation happen outside politics? In short, which constitutive sociological patterns underlie different types of civic behaviors in offline and online spaces, and what model of evaluation do we use when assessing them? Rather than focusing on methods of distinguishing good from bad citizens, or “light” from “dark” participation (Quandt, 2018), we should examine how good and bad perceptions of citizenship are constructed, situated, and recognized within their social context or field, through the media and beyond.

Conclusion and Critical Considerations

This study argued for the fruitfulness of a Bourdieusian framework for analyzing citizenship practices in contemporary societies. Our efforts were based on two predominant challenges. First, we proposed that we need to cut across the digital and nondigital realms to account for how citizens engage in democratic societies, which are characterized by deep mediatization (Hepp, 2020). Based on a review of key perspectives on citizenship in political science and media and communication research, we revealed that previous studies in general fall short of considering citizenship a coherent repertoire of activities that can occur in and beyond the media. We proposed the notion of “the unity of habitus,” which provides a theoretical basis for considering citizenship a dynamic process across online and offline spheres, and discussed this notion in relation to Hovden (2023), whose concept of “public lifestyles” provides a valuable development of Bourdieu’s work, as it scrutinizes the relation between citizens’ “inherently cross-mediated” (Schrøder, 2011) and physical, unmediated lives.

Second, we argued against the tendency to either neglect the role of social inequality or limit it to a mechanistic matter of resources. While the contributions from political science reviewed above proved valuable in conceptualizing the formal and political approaches, they tended to overlook how citizenship is woven into everyday life and how this occurs differently across social strata. Some studies, especially from the audience tradition, have argued for the need to consider the conflictual element and conceive citizenship practices as a part of larger societal struggles, and we argued that a Bourdieusian framework could be a useful step in that direction. This framework analytically recognizes the multiple ways that citizenship formation might occur and simultaneously addresses the vertical hierarchy and power relations of the social world, in which lifestyles and dispositions of agents, including those that relate to citizenship, occur as distinctions between different social strata of varying capital or power. In addition to elaborating on this perspective, we developed the contours of the notion of civic capital to critically assess how only some forms of citizenship are deemed legitimate. Civic capital directs our analysis toward societal introspection about whether the dominant categorizations of proper citizenship are sufficiently inclusive. This could be a useful supplement to further grasp the social fragmentation and populist surges that are present in many places today.

This framework has limitations and requires further development through theoretical reflections and empirical investigations. First, we need to reflect on whether civic capital is a new form of capital or a subset of an existing one (as Wacquant, 2019, has put it, not without a fair share of banter, we need to “avoid the comical multiplication” of capital ad infinitum if we can, as “hardly a month goes by without some scholar proposing new species!” (p. 18)). We argue that civic capital belongs to the overall domain of cultural capital, as many citizenship practices we reviewed correlate with education, linguistic skills, and familiarity with conventional civic culture and forms of participation. Conversely, this could be the case for many forms of capital and does not necessarily warrant refraining from developing new concepts to adequately describe certain aspects of social reality. To paraphrase one of Bourdieu’s own dictums, the value of concepts lies not in their theoretical exceptionality but in their practical applicability in our research designs (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).

Furthermore, if civic capital is defined as resources that citizens can apply in an attempt to influence society in a normative direction that they deem appropriate, a fair question to reflect upon is whether populist actions, such as the assault on Capitol Hill, can be viewed as forms of civic capital. Our tentative answer is not to refuse anything yet; while undoubtedly differing from the symbolic system of liberal democracy, we believe that the field of populism operates with distinct values and social hierarchies and, as such, could be scrutinized through the concepts of habitus and capital. However, using the word “civic” would likely be a stretch; rather, notions such as fringe capital or populist capital could be objects of further investigations. Thus, our use of civic capital relates specifically to the hidden forms of domination in a liberal democratic context.

Various points of critique are worth considering regarding empirical research designs. We note the importance of avoiding reproducing structures and assuming that categories and forms of capital proposed by Bourdieu in France in the 1970s can be imported into digital, datafied, and culturally diverse environments. We based our efforts on studies generated in the Scandinavian countries and recognize that the results might look different in other settings. In a similar vein, we would advise caution regarding the fatalistic undertones of the notions of symbolic power and dominance. If anything, the populist movements constitute clear rejections of elite categorizations and should perhaps be considered as—depending on the context—symbolic revolts rather than stern patterns of symbolic dominance.

To sum up, the conceptual framework we propose only makes sense in tandem with sound empirical scrutiny through qualitative and quantitative research designs. Previous studies have highlighted the problems inherent in the Bourdieusian approaches, and it is necessary to engage with and tackle such criticisms head-on.