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The End of Citizenship?
New Roles Challenging the Political Order
Erik Oddvar
Eriksen* and Jarle
Weig�rd**
Summary
Increasingly there is a tendency to refer to the
population of a state or a municipality in terms of
clients, users or customers of the public sector and its
services, rather than as political citizens. If one
accepts an economic conception of politics (going back to
Schumpeter and Downs), based on the assumption that
political life consists of individual choices in the same
way as the market economy does, this development will
probably not be seen as dramatic. If, on the other hand,
one understands politics as having an irreducible
collectivistic core, based on the ability to separate
legitimate from illegitimate interests through discourse
in the public sphere, these new relations might be seen
as a threatening privatization of the citizenry. While a
political citizen is obliged to look for the best
solution for society as a whole, a client, user or
customer only has to take account of his own demands.
However, the development must be analysed as a reasonable
and – within certain limits – warrantable
response to the increasing load and complexity of the
public agenda. But still, the citizen role must be kept
as the superior and integrative status in the
population's relationship to the authorities if democracy
is to have any meaning.
Introduction [1]
The growth of the public sector in modern society has
led to the emergence of new relationships between
citizens and the public authorities. The territorially
defined concept of citizenship links the legitimacy of
the state to the protection of the citizens' general
political and legal rights. We have, however, witnessed a
development in the direction of different types of
rights. This has resulted in a challenge to the
traditional basis for government legitimacy and
diminished the significance of citizenship itself. In
many respects citizens have acquired the role of clients,
i.e. recipients dependent on benefits provided by the
welfare state. They are more frequently defined as users
of public institutions' services, and they are also to an
increasing extent involved in customer relationships
vis-�-vis public institutions, more or less as they are
in relation to private sector producers in the market.
Furthermore, attitudes toward the public sector seem to
be changing as well. It is no longer only the more
libertarian parties that use market terminology when
discussing central and local government. For two decades
now such vocabulary has been characteristic
of the general political debate and everyday speech. This
is due to new reform strategies employed in the public
sector, i.e. New Public Management, based on
techniques taken from private sector management theory.
These reforms were effectively stimulated by the Reagan
administration in the USA and the Thatcher government in
Britain and is now part of the global terminology
of good management. [2]
New Public Management has given rise to new forms of
management such as management by objectives,
deregulation, decentralized budgeting, contracting out,
internal competition, and a new personnel policy based on
an incentive model. One common feature of all of
these reforms is the disconnection of what the public
sector provides – what it produces – from the
realm of political action. In addition,
these reforms are based on the premise that the price on
and demand for public goods are best determined if the
citizens are given the freedom to choose. Finally,
“production” is conducted by hived-off result
units. The rise in productivity comes about by means of
increasingly sophisticated information processing and
organizing technologies, and by allowing political
leaders more room for manoeuvring. [3]
In light of these developments, the question of
whether the old model of government legitimacy and
citizenship status still provides meaningful explanatory
categories is becoming increasingly topical. Is it now
obvious that those who claimed that politics may be
sufficiently accounted for with models taken from the
market economy were right? In other words, has the
economic view of democracy become an adequate expression
of the relationship between public authorities and
society? Social scientists have for some time made use of
market analogies in the study of political behaviour. At
the same time, some would also claim that citizens are
demonstrating an increasing orientation toward individual
benefit, or egoism. For example, Albert O. Hirschman
(1982) refers to a transition during the 1970s and 80s
from involvement to exchange. It is the desire for higher
income and more welfare that motivates the citizens in
their political activity. Thus, citizen status may be
reduced to customer status, and the exchange of taxes for
customer goods and the exchange of regulation for loyalty
become the ruling principles.
In the following, we shall argue against this
assumption on the basis that the issue of legitimacy may
not be resolved quite so easily. The development at the
EU level in which a constitution building process is
under way and already has produced a Union citizenship,
also testifies to the lingering importance of democratic
legitimacy based on citizenship's rights. However, this
is not to be discussed in this paper, because it is
obvious that the new roles represent responses to new
challenges facing public authorities in their contact
with citizens at the national level. First, we shall give
a brief presentation of the “classical” view of
citizenship and on that basis proceed to a critique of
the economic view of politics. In the next section, we
shall discuss the emergence of new roles that people
assume vis-�-vis the authorities, based on Norwegian and
Scandinavian experience. In conclusion, we shall consider
the consequences of these roles both functionally and
with respect to legitimacy.
The Citizen Role
In German, the concept of “B�rger”
(just as its Scandinavian equivalent “borger”),
contains an interesting duality which, in languages like
French and English, is signified by two separate
concepts, i.e. “citoyen”/”citizen”
and “bourgeois” (cf. Marx 1844, Walzer
1989, Nauta 1992). The origins of the citizen concept
may be traced as far back as to the ancient Greek city
states, where being a “citizen” entailed
membership in a specific political community from which
non-citizens were excluded. The modern idea that
citizenship involves individual legal rights which are
guaranteed by the state, and which even could be applied
against the state, would seem quite alien to the ancient
Greeks. The only right attached to citizenship for the
Greeks was the right to participate in the public life of
the state, which was more in the line of a duty and a
responsibility to look after the interests of the
community – an obligation (though one assumed
with pride) (Arendt 1958, Sabine 1937). The only form of
individual reward to be had from this kind of public
involvement was honor and respect, and such values may
not be transferred into the private sphere for
“consumption”. They were only meaningful in the
same public sphere, among the same citizens, from which
they emerged. Thus, Greek citizenship was of an
irreducibly collective nature.
The concept of the bourgeois has its roots in
Europe in the late Middle Ages, as new means of
production and new societal forms and needs sprang up
within protected city walls. Medieval cities were in many
ways enclaves, separate from the surrounding feudal
society. In the cities individual freedom was generally
greater and class barriers fewer than in the surrounding
agricultural society. Thus, conditions were more in line
with the functional demands of nascent capitalism. Rights
ensuring property owners against arbitrary state
intervention into private affairs were an important
prerequisite for the prospering of commercial life. At
the same time, protection of personal integrity and
private property could also be granted legitimacy on the
basis of humanist ideals. The functional and normative
arguments underlying such a conception of rights
underpinned the institutionalization of what Hegel (1821)
refers to as Die b�rgerliche Gesellschaft (the
civil society,) i.e., economic life as it developed
under capitalism.
These two different conceptions of the citizen may be
said to be united in the modern concept of citizenship.
As T.H. Marshall (1965) has pointed out, citizenship is
constituted first of all by civil rights, which
protect the citizen from the state. The individual may
exercise these rights in order to prevent state misuse of
power, and one of the primary constituents of the
legitimacy of modern states is, in fact, the protection
of such rights. This is the principle of the Rechtsstaat,
which is achieved when and to the extent there is
equality before the law. Such a system requires
abolishing the structure of feudal society, with its
special rights and obligations derived from the
individual's status and group affiliation (Sabine 1952).
Secondly, citizenship involves political rights,
which allow for participation in the governing of
society. This is the principle of the democratic
state, which may be said to have been achieved when all
adult citizens have gained the same access to effective
political influence. Thirdly, Marshall also includes social
rights in a concept of citizenship, i.e., rights which
ensure a material safety net. These constitute the welfare
state principle, which is considered realized to the
extent that members of a society have the same social
security in terms of health, life and welfare. Today's
citizenship concept can thus be understood as a
collection of rights linked to the individual, based on
the fundamental principles of liberty, universalism,
equality and legality.
Georg Jellinek (1911) has pointed out that various
types of rights differ in nature. Civil rights may be
said to have a typically liberal, negative status
(“status negativus”) in that they guarantee
freedom from state intervention in the private
sphere. Social rights, on the other hand, have positive
status (“status positivus”), as they grant
members of a society access to certain goods
through the state's reallocating interventions in the
civil society in general and in the market economy in
particular. Finally, political rights have an active
status (“status activus”), as they provide
citizens with participatory rights.
These distinctions, according to Habermas (1996),
result in a special position for the active, political
rights. They constitute the nucleus of citizenship. Only
such rights may be used to increase autonomy in that they
equip the citizen with the “self-referential
competence” that enables him/her to affect matters
which will influence his/her role in society. Civil and
social rights, on the other hand, do not actually extend
beyond the private dimension, in that their contribution
is to secure the individual's position as a private
actor. It is, however, fair to say that such rights
secure the legal and material basis necessary for the
realization of political rights and are thus justified.
But in principle, these may also coexist with
paternalistic and authoritarian political conditions in
society. Only political rights of participation are of an
irreducibly collective nature, as they involve the
citizens in processes of opinion and will formation above
and beyond their own private reality.
On a political level, citizenship rights imply an
opportunity to take part in deciding how society is to be
governed. But, on the other hand, they also imply an
obligation to subject oneself to government (Aristotle
1962). Ideally, this is expressed through the formation
of what Rousseau (1762) called la volont� g�n�rale.
This is an expression of those interests that the
citizens share, which in Rousseau's opinion, notably, are
not the sum of or a compromise between their private
interests. The general will is understood as the various
special interests, united, or merged at a higher level,
which gives them an impersonal and impartial nature. The
general will is thus an expression of the interests of
the individuals as citizens, and thus of the collective
interest of a society.
A collective interest need not immediately coincide
with each individual's personal interests. Ideally,
however, it should be such that each individual can
rationally see that the collective interest represents
the best solution from the point of view of those who do
not have a personal interest in the matter. In other
words, the collective interest of a society must be an
expression of the principle that like shall be treated
like, and unlike treated unlike, i.e. in accordance with
a general principle of justice. This is required in order
for “the common will”, as expressed in
collective decisions, to appear legitimate and thus
rationally binding also for those who may have
conflicting personal interests in any given matter.
However, determining what is in the interest of the
society at large, or what is to be considered the most
reasonable and just solution, may only be done in a free
deliberative process preceding decision making, in which
all interests and points of view may be presented,
scrutinized and criticized. The preferences have to be
laundered (Goodin 1986) and the legitimacy of decisions
tested in an open public debate. Thus, ultimately, it is
the validity of the arguments that determines what
constitutes a rational, collective will in a political
context, and we can only know what the people will when
everybody is heard.
The people only exist in a public sphere (Schmitt
1923:16). It is only when private individuals come
together as a group that the will of the people may be
formed. Thus, citizenship refers to a free political
public sphere, which is the requisite means for testing
the legitimacy of a governing body. The authority granted
to public institutions to make binding decisions on
behalf of the collective originates in the communicative
relationship inherent in citizenship, as the citizens
exercise their right to form a collective will. This is
also the basis for present-day forms of government,
though, among other things, the differentiation in the
structure of responsibilities has made the process and
means of establishing legitimacy more indirect and
insecure. There are, for example, clear indications that
“the general” is being increasingly challenged
by “the particular”.
In the early stages of the modern constitutional state
it was more obvious than today that issues on the public
agenda involved the common problems of society. In other
words, government business at that stage more clearly
revolved around issues which affected society collectively,
rather than issues whose consequences were felt only by
certain groups or individuals. Such matters included, for
example, the institutionalization of a legal system, a
security system for peace and order, laying the
groundwork for financial institutions and economic
activity, and building infrastructure in general. All of
these are very clearly public goods, i.e., goods whose
individual utility is difficult to delimit once they are
provided. During this period in history, the
responsibility of government was, in other words, to
guarantee the stabilising conditions for society. At that
time, however, governments were far less interested, and
able, to intervene actively in society than they are
today. The individual was in direct contact with
government authorities in far fewer situations compared
to more recent times.
An Alternative Conception of Politics – the Economic
Approach
The previous section presented an understanding of the
“nature” of politics based on citizenship as a
form of participation in a genuine state community,
founded on certain basic assumptions of a clearly
normative nature. There is, however, another important
approach to the study of politics which we may refer to
as the economic approach, as it imports models from the
economic sciences and applies them to political phenomena
(Schumpeter 1942, Downs 1957, Riker 1982). Briefly, this
approach claims that politics may be understood as a
parallel to economics, and that the political decision
making process is economic both in objectives and form
(cf. Elster 1986). Its objectives are perceived as
economic because it is primarily economic issues that are
on the political agenda. In this sense, politics appears
as a supplement to the market, for example, through
realizing public goods which would not be provided if
left to private interests, or by attempting to correct
the imbalances in the distribution of income which result
from the free operation of market forces. The form is
considered economic because, like economics, politics
builds on decentralized private decisions made by the
individual voter. Voting becomes the most important,
virtually the only political action the citizens
perform. Just like the consumer in the role as a market
actor, voters are believed to choose between political
alternatives on the basis of highly private and specific
personal interests.
In spite of the fact that there are certain striking
similarities between competition in the market and modern
political competition, an economic approach still does
not represent an adequate framework for understanding the
phenomenon of politics. This contention may be grounded
in an empirical, a logical-analytic as well as in a
normative way. From an empirical point of view, the
economic model can not reasonably be claimed to give a
complete explanation of what political life is actually
like. Such a conclusion has both intuitive and scientific
validity. Research using this approach in the study of
election results has shown that it is not possible
to demonstrate that self-interest is a very significant
factor for people's voting behaviour (Lewin 1991, cf.
Green and Shapiro 1994). Furthermore, political activity
is also closely linked to a medium which distinguishes it
clearly from the economy, i.e. public debate,
which systematically focusses attention in a collective
direction. In other words, public debate is necessarily
about what is good for society – the common good. It
is only by arguing on the basis of the public interest
that one is able to persuade others to share one's point
of view. An argument referring to private wants or
interests have little weight.
In the market sphere, on the other hand, things are
different. Under our economic system, it is generally
accepted that actors put their own interests before the
common good through basic institutions such as the market
and the private right to own and use property. Politics
may therefore only be interpreted as a parallel to the
economy if voting behaviour is considered analogous to
market behaviour in isolation; that is, if one does not
take into consideration that voting behaviour is related
to public debate. The franchise only becomes effective
when citizens' various motives, interests, needs and
desires are integrated through public debate. It is only
under such conditions that a vote is qualified (cf. Rawls
1971:356 ff, Habermas 1996:178 ff.).
From a logical-analytic perspective, our rejection of
the economic view of politics implies that it is also
impossible to imagine that politics would be able
to function according to the principles that that model
requires. As mentioned earlier, an economic
interpretation is among other things based on the idea
that politics functions as a supplement to the market and
that political measures may be taken to intervene in the
event of market failure. But this presupposes that
politics follows a type of logic that is different from
the market. Along with Rawls (1971:360), we may say that
while the market is oriented towards efficiency,
the main objective of politics is justice. A
market economy may be understood as the mutual adaptation
of independent actors to external forces in an
equilibrium system. Politics, on the other hand, is based
on actors' joint efforts to work out reasonable
interpretations of reality and to drum up support for
programs of action. As such, the market is an expression
of a form of instrumental logic, while politics is
an expression of a communicative logic.
Nevertheless, there are also mechanisms in the political
sphere which serve to relieve communication from its
coordinative functions, such as the principles of
legality and majority vote. These principles function in
specific contexts to exempt actors of the need to justify
their actions. Even so, there is a fundamental difference
between the two systems in that political solutions
involve a balanced coordination of the views of several
actors, while market solutions are based on the principle
that each individual actor acts on his own behalf and in
isolation.
The economy and the political system are thus in many
respects, if not completely, structured according to
different types of functional logic and standards of
rationality. Furthermore, social institutions that are
dependent on general acceptance and trust are
built on foundations of collective interpretations of
reality. And these foundations are maintained not least
through processes of political opinion formation. Without
such institutions (e.g., the contract and statute law) to
serve as a framework, strategic interaction in the market
could not last. If politics were based on private,
egoistic preferences, as the economic model of politics
requires, not only would it be impossible for the state
to function as a necessary supplement to the market by
producing and allocating goods on a basis other than
self-interest; the very ground under the institutions
supporting the market itself would crumble.
This leads to a rejection of the economic view of
democracy also on logical-analytic grounds. In general,
it cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of how a
qualified and broad acceptance of political decisions
comes about. It is not sufficient to interpret such
decisions as the sum total of, or the average of, the
individual actors' preferences (Miller 1993). Such a tack
is inadequate because it implies that the result is
contingent or arbitrary: it could always just as well
have been another. Decisions that are reached in such a
fashion are open to criticism from every direction, even
though they are derived from voting procedures which are
correct enough, technically speaking. In itself, a
majority decision just represents the will of the many,
not the will of the people. In order for decisions to
achieve sufficient authority, there must be recourse to
their substantive rationality. In other words,
there must be a possibility, if necessary, to demonstrate
through open argumentation that the decisions are
generally good or legitimate solutions to the
problem being considered. Public opinion, as expressed
through formal elections and technical decision-making
procedures requires further legitimation, which implies
that it must be in accordance with, or based on,
acceptable grounds. Thus politics involves efforts at
both interpretation and cooperation: it is therefor
necessary to agree, first, on a relevant interpretation
of the situation (what really is the case), and, second,
it is necessary to agree on what to do about it. The
particular rationale of politics is, in many respects, a
matter of being able to present options as sensible and
reasonable, i.e., as actions that everyone must agree to,
all things considered.
Finally, an economic interpretation of politics may
also be criticized on normative grounds. Politics built
on the unmediated private and selfish preferences of the
people would be dominated by the aggregating
rather than the integrating aspects of politics,
which would undermine legitimacy in the long run. If
political leaders only adapt to what voters already
believe, they will not be perceived as leaders, but as
followers. If a representative democracy is to function,
it requires a reciprocal relationship between voters and
politicians. Politicians must listen to what the voters
want, and at the same time suggest solutions and muster
support for their proposals. It may not be assumed that
good political options are pre-existent in the form of
voter “preferences”, and that the politicians'
job is merely to take note of those preferences (March
& Olsen 1989). In most cases, such alternatives
– as well as the support for them – are
themselves the result of a political process.
Another aspect of the problem is that politics is
anchored in the principle of justice. The principle of
justice is most clearly expressed ideologically in the
liberal traditions of constitutional law and the social
democratic welfare state tradition, respectively. The
latter is linked to the more extensive aim of rectifying
existing discrepancies, and thus creating a fairer social
distribution. It is difficult to see how the social
objective, which is a primary part of politics and public
activity as we know it today, can be promoted through
policies dominated by the same fundamental self-interest
which, through the operation of the market, has created
the very same discrepancies that the political decisions
are meant to remedy. For that reason, it is necessary
that politics, through the role of active citizens, is
grounded in a public sphere where it is the convincing
power of the better argument that ultimately determines
the outcome.
In spite of the fact that the economic view of
politics seems to be untenable on the basis of several
matters of principle, it has nonetheless become the
dominant model for Western, particularly American,
political thought in the post-war era. Several factors
may have contributed to such a development. First, there
is the decline of important areas of the public sphere
which several theoreticians claim to have demonstrated
(Weber 1922, Schmitt 1923, Schumpeter 1942, Habermas
1989). Second, and which is an aspect of the relegation
of the public sphere, the formation of political parties
and interest groups and the changing role of the mass
media have led to a more instrumentalized politics.
Political parties have become more concerned with
maximizing the number of votes won than with discussing
the question of what constitutes a good and just society,
or how such a society may be realized. Interest
organizations are designed to further the interests of a
narrowly defined group of members, and to employ the
means of extra-legal influence, which in turn reduce the
significance of the primary political rights of the
citizens. The mass media has, some contend, become just
as much a channel for propaganda and for mindless and
manipulative sensationalism as for investigative
journalism and critical debate. Finally, citizens,
through the construction of the welfare state, have been
granted new rights which emphasize the administrative
aspect of the public sector and debilitate the genuine
role of the citizen.
The Emergence of New Roles: Clients, Users and Customers
By the rise of the welfare state, the state became an
instrument of social improvement, as a parallel and
supplement to what could be achieved through the market
system. By establishing a number of social, medical and
educational services, the public sector assumed
responsibility for providing benefits in areas where the
market did not, or where some individuals were unable to
avail themselves of what the market had to offer.
However, in spite of the fact that such social services
were given a universal design, they still resulted in a
division among citizens – between those who actually
benefited from the government-provided services and those
who did not. The majority of these services were directed
at groups that had a real need for help, so that it was
the sick, the elderly, the poor and the unemployed who
received government assistance. These groups consequently
assumed a new relationship with the state in addition to
their position as citizens: they became clients of
the welfare state. These people's rights as clients could
be exercised in a relatively automatic way (by being
defined into a group on the basis of a set of objective
criteria). This mark a contrast to the case of political
citizens' rights, which only guarantee the right to try
to influence public policy. However, even though clients
enjoyed certain rights, their role also implied a
disempowered position at the same time. First of all,
being labelled a welfare client entailed a certain stigmatization
of the individual: these people were considered part of
the consuming rather than the “contributing”
part of society, hence a problem of dependency. Secondly,
groups of welfare clients had little opportunity to
change their own situation; they were largely subject to
decisions made by various professionals and government
bureaucrats, hence a problem of paternalism.
An additional aspect of the
development of the social citizenship role is that local
governments became an increasingly important
administrative tier. The welfare state often was,
in practice, the welfare commune (i.e., the
municipality). [4]
In this development several factors were important. First
of all, it was often the local councils that were the
most innovative in introducing services which later
gained status as nationally guaranteed rights, e.g.,
retirement pensions. Secondly, it was often the local or
regional councils which were given executive authority in
welfare matters. This is the case for schools and
day-care institutions, health and social services, and
care for the elderly. Today it is primarily the case that
the state has direct authority for legislating nationally
standardized benefits, such as pension payments, while
local governments are left to deal with areas in which
the provision of services takes place through real-life
contact with the clients.
As the range of services and benefits provided by the
welfare state was gradually extended to an increasing
number of different areas, many saw the paternalism
involved in the provision of services as increasingly
problematic. This is true for areas such as schools,
daycare facilities, health services and services for the
elderly. Today such services are an integrated part of
“everybody's” normal life, which in itself
legitimate their use. Those who receive them thus avoid
the stigma which is otherwise easily attached to benefits
which are awarded to those with a “particular
need”. Consequently, they have less reason to accept
the subordinate status associated with
“clients”. Furthermore, the idea that the
substance of such services should be determined, in
detail, by public authorities without participation of
those most affected does not conform to current views of
democracy. Management of services may also represent a
work-load problem for government authorities,
particularly for local-level political bodies, whose
members are part-time politicians.
The solution to these difficulties has to some extent
been to move away from a perception of those who make use
of public services as passive recipients of
benefits to a view of these individuals as active
users of them. This implies, among other things, that
the various groups are allowed to be involved in the
process of determining the services, within a given
framework and guidelines. This has been most prevalent in
the education sector, where, as a result of the radical
student movement in the early 1970s, there has been a
growth in the establishment of committees and boards with
representatives of both students, and, at the elementary
and level, also parents. This user-democratic tendency
has coincided with a trend towards industrial democracy,
where the employees in public institutions were also to
be given a voice in matters concerning their workplace.
The result of these tendencies was, primarily, a
diminishing of the old-school authority associated with
the positions of school headmaster/principal, or
professors at the universities, but also a certain degree
of increased institutional self-government at the expense
of higher political and administrative authorities. Even
though user representation currently seems to be less
common and less formalized in the governing bodies of
health and social service institutions than in
educational institutions, there still seems to be a change
of mentality taking place in these institutions as
well. Administrative authorities, institutional
management and employees seem, to a larger degree, to perceive
the individuals in question more as users and not
clients, and are thus to a greater extent addressing
their expressed desires. The user role is in many
respects an expression of a new component in the
relationship between the people and the authorities, and
it is based on the principle that affected parties should
have a say. This in many ways implies a broadening of
democracy, though, as we shall see later, a user
democracy may not be immediately equated with a citizens'
democracy.
The involvement of the public sector has also extended
to areas other than those which may reasonably be called
welfare policy areas. In contrast to welfare policy,
these areas are not ones in which citizens enjoy a legal
right as a result of the social component of citizenship.
But they are services which the authorities – for
various reasons – still consider it their
responsibility to provide, and they are usually delivered
in exchange for cash payment. As these programs are not
usually financed through the treasury, they are also
often hived off from the regular public institutions and
government budgets and organized in separate companies.
For the most part these organizations provide technical,
infrastructure-related services, though they may also be
found in, for example, the cultural sector. Some of the
organizations are run by the state government, and some
also have quite a long history, for example, national
communications institutions such as the postal service,
the railway system, the telecommunications service and
the aviation services. However, the majority of these
institutions are run by local governments, and they have
for the most part been built up during the local
government expansion period after WWII. Examples of local
government organizations of this type include
transportation services, power plants, water works,
sanitation services of various types, land development,
and cultural activities such as cinemas, theaters, and
museums. Such services may be subsidized to varying
degrees; they may operate on a break-even basis; or they
may generate a net profit for their government owners.
Since people pay in return for a specific service, their
use of these services places them in a relationship
vis-�-vis the government which is at least somewhat
analogous to a market relationship. However, this
customer-like relationship is not always perceived as
real. For example, one may be required to pay a given fee
for sanitation and water services simply by virtue of
one's place of residence. Such fees may not be considered
significantly different from ordinary property taxes by
most people. One is likely to experience more of a
customer-like status when purchasing a ticket to the
movies, or when buying a piece of property from the local
government, or even when hooking up to the local
telephone service.
On the whole, public organizations have produced these
services under monopoly conditions, which means that the
markets for these services have not been open for
competiton. But there has been a clear trend toward
market liberalization in recent years in Scandinavia.
This overall trend has taken various forms in different
areas. For the postal and telecommunication services, for
example, there has been a certain degree of private
access to the market. Through changes in communications
legislation, the authorities have also aimed to introduce
a greater degree of competition between private,
semi-private and public corporations in bus services. In
the area of electricity distribution, new legislation in
Norway opens up for competition between a large number of
mostly publicly owned power companies.
An additional tendency towards privatization has been
witnessed within a number of municipalities. These local
councils have opted to allow private companies to compete
for contracts to provide various services, such as
sanitation, for example. Thus private companies provide
services on behalf of the local government (contracting
out). And finally, liberalization has also been seen in
instances where local councils have chosen to demerge
certain parts of the public service organisation and
establish separate companies, or quasi-companies with
more or less autonomous status vis-�-vis the
municipality's administrative and political bodies.
The boundary between public and private economic
activity may consequently seem unclear and under
pressure. And it is not always intrinsic features of the
public services themselves which call for public sector
organization. For that reason, it is logical to ask
whether the management of resources is as effecient as it
could. One of the most highly prevalent consequences has
been the attempt to replace management using detailed
regulatory frameworks with the management by objectives
(cf. Dr�cker 1976). By such an overall guideline,
subordinate units are given greater freedom to choose the
means by which to reach the specified ends.
According to this ideology, the public sector ends up
in the role of a commodity-producing firm, and the
citizens wind up as customers to be satisfied by having
their demands met in the market for public services. This
model is particularly relevant at the local government
level, and it may be that many people primarily perceive
the local government in precisely this way. Many have
been puzzled over the fact that voter turnout is much
lower for local elections than for national,
parliamentary elections. This low turnout is particularly
surprising in light of studies which show that people are
generally most concerned with, and most satisfied with,
activities that are the responsibility of local
government (Hansen 1989). Part of the explanation may lie
in the fact that most people are involved with the local
government in its capacity as producer of services and
less in its capacity as political entity: in other words,
they see the local council more from a consumer
perspective than from the perspective of political
codetermination (Fevolden & S�rensen, (eds.) 1989).
* * *
The client, user and customer roles all seem to
represent a challenge to the classical role of the
citizen. We are witnessing an increasing number of
contexts in which attempts are made to structure people's
interaction with government authorities in accordance
with logics which spring out of each of these roles. If
these attempts succeed, what will the consequences be?
Will such a development constitute the undermining of the
citizen role?
The Client Role: A System of Rights
We may envisage that an increasing number of people
receive welfare benefits from the state (or from the
local governments), and that such benefits become
available in an increasing range of areas. This may be
achieved by passing more legislation guaranteeing rights
to specific types of benefits. If this line of action was
taken to the extreme, the result would be a public sector
running on autopilot. If we imagine a point at
which this system of rights is “complete”, then
both politics and, consequently, the political rights of
the citizen will have lost all significance. The only
thing that would remain would be management of already
existing systems and programs, which would be carried out
by various professions and the welfare bureaucracy. The
people would assume the role of taxpayers, on the one
hand, and consumers of public services on the other. Such
a scenario may be accounted for in terms of a
functionalist system (Habermas 1987:320).
The problems inherent in this scenario appear quite
soon. First of all, there are the practical limitations
of a fiscal nature. There are often big problems
financing today's programs and services, and hardly room
for introducing a lot of new ones. The most important
objections, however, are of a more principal nature.
These objections are related to the fact that the
citizens, in such a situation, are reduced to passive
recipients of services provided by the public sector and
prevented from being actively involved in the
construction of this sector. Thus this model represents a
clear loss of political autonomy. People lose the
opportunity to participate publicly, on the basis of
their status as citizens, to impact on matters that
affect their own lives. Their interests vis-�-vis the
government would have to be entirely private in nature.
Fora which allow for the deliberation and formation of
public opinion and channels for the transformation of
such opinion into political programs and practical
results will become insignificant. The legitimation of
programs of social reallocation, which is necessary for
the welfare state and is an important component of the
political process, will thus be undermined. The clear
tendencies toward a private-oriented public
opinion, which have been observed in most democratic
countries, and which, among other things, are expressed
through demands for lower taxes, will most probably
spread, particularly to those groups of the population
who believe that they pay more into the system than they
receive in return. Opposition may grow so strong that it
may destroy the foundations of the system of rights and
the collective consciousness underlying the extended
client role.
It is, nevertheless, clear that in our society, the
role of client has a justified (though limited) position.
In some areas it is necessary to guarantee the rights of
the individual in order to compensate for the often
arbitrary misfortune and suffering of individuals and
groups. Welfare rights are necessary for realizing full
citizenship. An important aspect of such rights is that
even though political decisions form the basis for their
existence, other principles of coordination are
significant as well. First, it is clear that a welfare
program, as it is established as a right, is in a
way exempted from the ongoing political process. Only
amending legislation, not ordinary political or
administrative decisions, can legally withdraw a given
right from an individual. A welfare client who believes
that s/he has been deprived of his or her rights does not
need to travel the long and uncertain road of the
political process, i.e., to try to win a majority for
his/her point of view. A number of politically
independent institutions, such as appeals boards,
ombudsman's offices, and ultimately the courts are
available in order to ensure that the individual's right
to public welfare services is preserved. In a way, it may
be claimed that this is also an expression of the fact
that the concern for absolute democracy must yield to the
concerns of the rule of law (Smith 1992). This issue is
particularly topical in connection with the local and
regional governments' administration of national
legislation. For example, is lack of financial resources
sufficient justification for failure to provide the
benefits guaranteed by legislation in the social and
health sectors? If it is, it may always be claimed that
local decision makers could and should have had different
priorities.
Secondly, we see that client rights are dissociated
from politics through a kind of market mechanism that
regulates the supply of welfare benefits. The authorities
try to adapt their supply to changes in the demand, i.e.,
they try to adjust input to match the level of the
clients' claims (Baldersheim and St�hlberg (eds.) 1994).
One of the aims of introducing management by objectives
in the public sector is to make the service-providing
system more flexible and able to tune in to and respond
to needs as they are expressed locally. Instead of the
traditional governing by rules, which channels efforts
and input in accordance with programs set at superior
levels in the political system, the new approach aims at
governance from below. In other words, it is the
“real” needs of the clients that are to
determine the allocation of resources. There are
advantages and disadvantages associated with both the
desire for and the possibility of realizing such a
management principle. On the one hand, it is obvious that
the objective of welfare policy must be to allocate funds
to where the need is greatest. On the other hand, it is
equally clear that balancing the various needs observed,
at least at a higher level, can only be done on a
political basis (Eriksen 1996).
The User Role: Privatized Democracy
The concept of management by objectives is often
linked to a user perspective and a public
service perspective on government. The main task of
public bodies is to produce services, and to produce
the services that the users want. One of the
problems here is how to pick up the relevant signals from
the users. Within the market economic system this is
fairly easy, as this type of system has the money medium
to serve as a quick and efficient reflector of changes in
demand. A similar medium is not usually present with the
production of public services. [5]
Possible remedies to the problem may be to carry out user
surveys to record people's views on public services or to
have user representation in the bodies governing service
producing institutions (cf. Culpitt 1992:139 ff).
The above measures constitute important contributions
to increasing the influence of the individual on public
administration. For that reason, they are duly entitled
to a position in any system of government which, in
general, is in need of more input from below. It is also
clear that much of the day-to-day interaction between
public providers and users has a genuinely communicative
basis, where justification come into play. Nevertheless,
from a broader perspective, this represents a form of
limited government. In particular, it is clear that,
strictly speaking, such a system only allows for the
expression of special interests. It is those
individuals or groups who are “particularly
affected” by a certain decision who are allowed to
express their views, and who are granted the opportunity
to put forward their own demands, without at the same
time being forced to see their needs relative to those of
other, contending groups. Thus these interests maintain a
private nature: they are not subject to the same
legitimation demands as ordinary political expressions.
Thus they may only express a limited, not a general,
validity.
When the time comes to balance various interest and
needs, and rank priorities relative to each other, we are
unable to base our decisions on user signals alone. The
fact that a particular welfare benefit or service is
demanded by more people is not necessarily an unambiguous
indication that this service should be given top priority
from a general point of view. The political and
professional decision makers at high levels, whose job it
is to consider the interests of the whole, must be
able to consider the quantity of the demand relative to
the quality of the demand. In other words, this question
involves asking how fundamental a need is for those
affected, relative to how many are affected. Furthermore,
such decision makers are responsible for looking after
the interests of weaker groups who find it difficult to
make their voices heard. All of these normative
considerations, which cut to the heart of the welfare
state, are difficult to incorporate, or account for,
within a broad user-based perspective. This perspective
is primarily useful within limited contexts, in which
questions more often imply the application of an
efficiency standard than a standard of justice. In other
words, it is most applicable in contexts where decisions
concern making effective use of available resources
according to well defined criteria, rather than
determining priorities among contending needs.
The Customer Role: Market Management of Public Services
There is also a growing tendency towards describing
the relationship between the government and the people in
terms of a customer relationship. This is particularly
prevalent, as mentioned, at the local level, where the
contact between the authorities and “the
public” is most direct. This perspective has been
accompanied by a desire for the public sector to adapt internally
to the standards operative in the private sector. For
example, a company group model for local government
organization has been launched and partially implemented
in several districts. In this model the head
administrator plays the part of managing director and the
various sectors are subsidiary companies (Baldersheim
1986).
We may say that a customer-type relationship exists
when the recipient must pay for access to a service. As
mentioned earlier, there are many examples of this type
of relationship in the public sector. The issue at stake
is whether it is possible to conceive of the relationship
between government and the people in general in
such terms, and if so, whether this is a desirable
development. In order to consider the question, it is
necessary to distinguish between three areas of public
responsibility. The first area of responsibility includes
tasks related to administration of the civil and
political components of citizenship, i.e. execution of
political authority in a strict sense. Another area
of responsibility includes administration of the social
aspects of citizenship, or welfare service provision.
The third area is composed of those activities which may
not be immediately linked to any specific aspect of
citizenship rights, and includes, in practice, production
of collective goods and public commercial
activity.
As for the first area, it represents the basic domain
of public sector activity. This area includes activities
which are difficult to privatize or commercialize. The
government can not leave ultimate control over the core
legal, political and power institutions to others without
at the same time dissolving itself. It may delegate the
job of legal and political governance of certain tasks to
private organizations or other levels of administration,
but the ultimate control must still remain in the
hands of the central government. And if the activities of
the executive government, the parliament and the public
administration were commercialized in the sense that
private interests were forced to pay every time a
decision was made, the result would be the transformation
of these institutions into a caricature of what they were
meant to be. Such a caricature already exists in many
societies and is referred to as corruption. These
activities are typical examples of collective tasks in a
society, and they therefor must be financed through
public spending.
The third area includes several tasks which have some
features in common with the tasks included in the first
category. Indeed, though they can not be said to
represent anything like constitutive state
responsibilities, they do share certain characteristics
to the extent that they may all be considered natural
areas of government activity. Some members of this
category may also be referred to as public goods,
as they benefit everyone once they are realized (Olson
1965). As a result, these goods can not be
commercialized, as private business enterprises will
usually not invest in their realization. Examples of such
activities include various infrastructure measures and
projects aimed at achieving cleaner air or water, etc. A
slightly different category is that of natural
monopolies. In these cases, investors may cover their
expenses through customer payment, but mostly the level
of investment required is so high that it is very
difficult for several businesses to construct parallel
systems to provide competing services. Examples here
include power and telephone lines, water and sewer
systems, filtering plants, rail and trolley lines. In the
case of natural monopolies, it is not immediately obvious
that it is the state that should be responsible for
building and operating the services. But it has
traditionally been considered more secure and appropriate
that the monopoly be public rather than private. However,
drawing the line between those tasks which, for practical
reasons, must be carried out by the state, and those for
which it may be possible to permit private initiative is
not easy. This becomes clear from a comparative
perspective, whether one compares cross-nationally, or
over time. In the US today, for example, there are
examples of privately operated, commercially financed
fire brigades. Similarly, the “night-watchman
state” is often used as a label for the period in
the development of the state in which government
responsibilities were at an absolute minimum. Today, with
our much expanded public sector, we are witnessing the
paradox that security services are a booming industry:
private companies are paid to protect private property
much as the publicly employed night-watchman did in the
19th century. An example of the opposite development
might be the operation of lighthouses, which are often
mentioned as the type of service that would be impossible
to operate commercially. Even so, there was a period
during the 18th century when some lighthouses in Norway
were privately financed through a system of fees charged
to passing ships.
But the third category also includes a number of
activities which could, in principle, be left to the
market, but which for various reasons are still carried
out by the public sector. An example might be local
government regulation, development and sale of land. It
is possible to argue for a much freer sale and use of
real estate, but the government has taken it upon itself
not only to regulate land use and development, but also
to develop real estate for use. In return, local
governments charge directly for this service through a
number of fees. This arrangement seemingly represent an
unproblematic solution, both in terms of practice and
principle. As an additional example: in most countries
the operation of movie theaters is left to the free
operation of market forces. But in Norway, these theaters
are run by the local government authorities, on cultural
policy grounds. On the other hand, local governments may
choose to allow, or not to allow, private companies to
compete for contracts to provide various other services
such as sanitation, snow removal, or laundry and cleaning
in public institutions. With the exception of due
considerations to the situation of affected employees, it
is difficult to imagine any objections in
principle in any case. A local government's decision to
provide this kind of services itself or to pay a private
company to do so should be based on an pragmatic
evaluation of what is most efficient. There is no point
in a local government body producing a such services if
private agents can do it equally well at a lower price. [6] For local
government sanitation employees fighting to keep their
jobs, there is no more valid criterion to refer to than
that their public services are competitive with
the private alternatives.
The normative problems that arise are
primarily related to the areas of responsibility included
in the second category, i.e., those pertaining to
individual social rights, or welfare benefits. Within
this category there has been an obvious rise in
commercialization. This tendency most often takes the
form of introducing or increasing user charges, [7] especially in the
area of health and social services. Similar arrangements
may also be conceivable in the education sector in the
form of school tuition fees (although so far not
introduced in the public education system in
Scandinavia). The dilemma that arises in considering
charging for such services results because, on the one
hand, in practical terms it is perfectly feasible
to introduce a commercial element (and, indeed, it may
often seem necessary on financial grounds). On the
other hand, it seems that doing so could change the
nature of these services in a fundamental way. Quite
simply, the issue represents a collision of the
inclusionary principles of citizens' rights and the
exclusionary principles of the market. Citizens' rights
are characterized by their universality: such rights are
guaranteed to all who meet certain objective criteria.
The market, on the other hand, is built on the (from a
normative angel) arbitrary criterion that only a person
with purchasing power may have access to a good. The
modern public sector is built on a basic recognition that
the market economy produces social dysfunctions which
necessitate a corrective mechanism. The welfare state
model holds that the most fundamental conditions for the
life and well-being of an individual be ensured by
society, and not left to chance, merit or charity (cf.
Dworkin 1981, Plant 1993).
It seems, then, that only in areas which are not
fundamentally related to citizenship rights may
commercial forms of trade be introduced relatively
painlessly. This implies that the citizen role can only
be redefined as a customer role at the expense of
considerable loss of legitimacy. The customer role can
only be found suitable for publicly produced goods which
from an allocational point of view could just as
well have been produced by the market. This also implies
that for some publically produced goods for which
payment is received, it is impossible to argue in
principle against privatization in one form or another.
However, privatization may take many forms (Ascher
1987). One of the most common involves the separation of
certain tasks from the ordinary administrative
organization, and de-regulating them by turning them into
smaller, more or less autonomous companies, or
quasi-corporate organizations which are still publicly
owned. In most cases the objective is to make the
organizations more efficient and adaptive by allowing for
simpler decision making routines, etc. This is often
achieved, but local government experience suggests that
many times little remains of the government's opportunity
to exercise political control in such companies
(Weig�rd 1993). The principles of private law sanctioned
in business legislation are often in conflict with the
governing principles of public law which must be followed
by political and administrative organizations. But if the
political-administrative ability to govern these tasks
disappears, perhaps the justification for government
ownership involvement also disappears. If the ability to
meet commercial demands are allowed to dominate an area,
then a private sector company may, in many cases, be
better able to do the job than a publicly owned one.
Conclusion
There is a clear and increasing tendency today towards
evaluating actions taken by public bodies according to
criteria which originally were meant for private actions
in the market. Efficiency is in the process of becoming
the primary measure of quality in this sector too, while
other considerations are being displaced. If such
considerations are allowed to dominate public sector
activity, then the government is reduced to nothing more
than any other commodity producing firm, which may just
as well be run privately. At risk is thus our
understanding of the distinction between public and
private sector activities as one of kind; that is, our
belief that certain things may be traded in the market
without that being detrimental to citizenship, while
other things are inherently matters of public concern.
However, it is also possible that efficiency
considerations will not be allowed to dominate, and that
they may be reconciled with traditional public sector
values such as equality, accountability and control. In
addition, the “difference in kind” between
public and private may not (as we have seen) coincide
with the division between what actually are
private and public sector responsibilities. It may be
that certain tasks are carried out in the public sector
for reasons that are less related to matters of
principle, and more due to arbitrary reasons.
Citizenship has changed over time, and its
significance has also varied in different historical
periods (Nauta 1992, Kymlicka and Norman 1994). Many
scholars have interpreted increasing privatization and
political ambivalence in modern states as a result of
consumer- and utility-oriented morals. In other words,
the citizens seem to show more of a passive orientation
towards rights than active participation in society (Bell
1976, Bellah et al. 1986, 1991, Sandel 1996). The new
roles that individuals are given may also contribute to
this development, as they structurally relieves people
from the necessity to consider their own needs and
demands relative to others'.
This development is, however, part of the larger
picture of globalization. The world order is
rapidly changing due to global structures of production,
trade and communication that may evaporate the boundaries
of the state. Increasingly, the world is becoming one
through the revolution in telecommunication, in transport
and in the formation of global financial markets (Held
1995). We are witnessing the expansion of economic power,
especially through multinational corporations, at the
cost of political power. Depolititization is the
consequence of globalization as there is an increasing
incongruence between economic and political life.
Decisions affecting people's life and welfare are made in
contexts beyond democratic control. This means there is a
decoupling between the citizens as equals among equals in
the public sphere – citoyens – and citizens as
bourgeois, i.e., as private persons in the market sphere.
Economic globalisation makes the citizens remain private
because citoyen and bourgeois is no longer members of the
same community (K�hler 1998: 238). However, in order to
fully assess the future of citizenship, at least in
Europe, we have to take into consideration the extent of
political internationalisation going on – ranging
from international organisations to social movements and
NGOs – and especially the initiatives to build
supra-national organisations, in particular the EU. For
the purpose of rescuing what originally was a European
idea of securing both the private and the public autonomy
of the people, the development towards a European
citizenship is promising. Citizenship status is based
on the idea that all members of a society function in two
capacities: as private actors and as public actors. This
is the quintessence of modern democracy.
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Weber, M. (1922/1978): Economy and Society. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Weig�rd, J. (1993): Kommunal selskapsorganisering.
Om bruk av fristilte organisasjonsformer i
kommunesektoren. Troms�: NORUT Samfunnsforskning.
Translated from Norwegian by Sandra Halvarson in
co-operation with the authors.
Footnotes
* ARENA,
P.O.Box 1143 Blindern, 0317 Oslo. Tel. +47 22 85 59 57,
fax: +47 22 85 78 32, email: e.o.eriksen@arena.uio.no
.
** Institute
of Political Science, University of Troms�.
[1] This
is a revised version of an article published in Norwegian
in Norsk StatsvitenskapeligTidsskrift, vol. 9.
1993, and in the book Kommunikativ ledelse, Bergen
1999, by Erik O. Eriksen. To be published slightly
altered in C. McKinnon and I. Hampsher-Monk: The
Demands of Citizenship. London: Cassell.
[2] At
least according to the TINA slogan: There is no
alternative.
[3] See
e.g., Self 1993, Hood 1991, Hood and Jackson 1991,
Pollitt 1993, Olsen and Peters 1996.
[4] At
least this applies to the Norwegian case (Gr�nlie 1988).
[5] With
the exception, of course, of those public services that
are sold in a commercial market in competition with other
producers.
[6]
However, this is not to say that the authorities may as
well surrender all control over a particular service.
[7] A
percentage of the total cost charged to the user for a
given service.
[Date of publication in the ARENA
Working Paper series: 15.11.1999]
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