Burgers bevraagd over burgerschap

Abstract

Citizenship is a term that is widely used in Dutch politics over the last years. New plans are developed to boost citizenship norms and encourage people to take responsibility. Many social scientists tried to discover patterns regarding involvement in activities and thinking about citizenship. Although many thus deal with issues around this theme, no one really involves citizens’ own opinions concerning this matter. This study looks at citizens’ conceptions of good citizenship, using 2004 International Social Survey Data. Hereby, we focus not only on citizenship duties, but also on citizenship rights. According to previous research, citizenship duties are divided into two categories: one that measures engaged citizenship and another one focusing on duties of citizenship. We perform lineair regression analyses and logistic regression analyses to investigate whether political affiliation can function as a predictor of citizenship conceptions. Political affiliation is expressed in three partyfamilies; namely leftist, confessional and rightist parties. Overall, respondents score the highest on citizenship rights, lower on citizenship duties and lowest on engaged citizenship. Political ideology still appears to be of significance, especially when it comes to engaged citizenship. Hereby leftist voters, and to a lesser extent confessional voters, score significantly higher on these duties than rightist voters. Concerning citizenship duties, no conclusions can be drawn since there are no significant results found. Lastly, rights seem to be, against our expactations, most important for leftist voters and the least for rightist voters.