Democracy and citizenship: expanding domains

Contemporary political theory includes lively debates about the meaning and scope of both democracy and citizenship. To survey and comment on some key recent threads in the arguments, I adopt the frame of ‘expanding domains’ and link the two concepts together, to ask: what impact might different innovations in democratic thinking have on our conception of citizenship? I will explore key ways in which elements of contemporary innovative conceptions of democracy – deliberative, ‘difference’, cosmopolitan, ecological and others - seek to reconstruct and reconstrue citizens and citizenship (and often disagree with each other in the process, within and across these categories of innovation). I shall do this, first, by pinpointing some key ways in which these innovations – openly or implicitly - seek to reconfigure citizenship along three key dimensions, and secondly, by showing how expanding our thinking about a third core political concept – representation – is crucial in efforts to respond to the expanded domains of citizenship and democracy