Strengthening democratic citizenship: educational, political and governance innovations

Abstract visual symbolising democratic citizenship through education, political engagement and governance innovation — Exploring innovative approaches to strengthen democratic citizenship across education, politics and governance

At the ECPR joint sessions-workshop from 20.5.-23.5.2025 in Prague, one workshop dealt with the implications of challenges in democracy for democratic citizenship education exploring innovative approaches. This article provides a reflection on four of 16 presentations from Sweden, UK, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Estonia.

L. Kalev provided an overview of the normative and structural ideations and practices of democratic citizenship. Citizenship is defined as the relationship between the state (institutions) and its citizens, based on normative frameworks that can be national, republican, neo-liberal or social justice oriented. There are several possible ways to productively structure and use ideations and practices of democratic citizenship in different substantive dimensions, such as horizontal, vertical, global, transnational, and national. In this process the agency of the people is central.

The distinction can be made between a normative, cognitive agency and the structural legitimacy frames for developing it, for which the dynamic interrelation between policy and public actors is constitutive. Therefore, the objectives must be deliberated out of a plurality of wills. A performative perspective on the public constates an interplay between democratic institutions/public authorities and public activities. This interplay is characterised by suspense and expressed constructively, with the objective of enhancing the quality of life through purposive common action.

Citizens’ agency should be reinforced through education for democratic competences as categorised in the project DEMOCRAT as solidary participation, deliberation, judgement and critical thinking, and democratic resilience. The autonomy and agency of democratic citizenship is practically acknowledged by state authority and facilitated by societal or transnational actors. This liaison enables to react to obstacles that arise iteratively given that the goals of the state’s institutions are not fixed but evolved in the interaction with citizens.

Jo Howard described the creation of Citizenship through participatory action research (PAR), which explores and critically engages with lived experience and subjectivities and enables action-oriented collective analysis. Citizen ‘agency’ is intimately connected to the structures of power that shape and limit agency, which citizens depend upon and oppose to them as they are shaped by norms and practices that are beyond their control.

J. Howard proposes a practical approach to self- and group-citizen formation by using storytelling and story-listening as reflection and empowerment tools for marginalized groups to “re-articulate” their selves back in society. When participants share experiences of marginalisation, the self-formation can involve a collective process of self-recovery and consciousness-raising that enables them to draw from the painful experience of not belonging to create a richly educative space and a conscious political stance that fuels their activism in the public sphere.

The ground of this playful approach is the combination of two elements. Firstly, there is a focus on the learning process inspired by Dewey and Freire, which is, secondly, backboned by Foucault’s concept of subjectification viewed from a critical perspective of power, as Butler suggests. The synthesis of both is combined with the understanding of social reality by Bourdieu. Bourdieu emphasises that the (pre-)existing hierarchical relationships and conflicts are embedded between different fields and in various subject positions. They are (re-) produced by objective und subjective structures on the fields due to unequal distribution of different forms of capital.

Nordberg, Rautanen and Hallik understand co-creation as the most engaged form of stakeholder participation, bringing together citizens and authorities. It encompasses collaboratively joint identification of challenges and needs, the exploration of opportunities for improvement, the joint development of solutions, and, in some cases, the participation in the governance of their implementation. Co-creation is built on a relational foundation that seeks to distribute power more equally and create meaningful opportunities for influence by integrating elements of participatory and deliberative democracy in a way that enhances both individual and collective benefits for democratic citizenship.

This participatory concept is combined with playful elements to address young people and to match them with civil experts from the local community. The encounter with “real” professionals as well as the use of digital tools has been proven as supportive for youth participation. Targeting young people in schools made it possible to address the whole scale of society and not only those who are engaged in society by intrinsic motivation. The assessment of the intervention referred to a set of “democratic goods” like inclusiveness, efficacy, resilience, transferability, and others. Every-day problems like coordinating schedules and the hierarchic school structure are identified as main obstacles and it is recommended a long-term planning process with the schools and civic administration.

A. Schmid referred to the Global Citizen education program of UNESCO. The transnational value of pluralistic normative set fosters solidarity participation and resilience through a multi-perspective approach which invites minorities to contribute to a pluralistic dialogue. On this background theatrical approaches offer the possibility to change the relationship between the actors involved. They activate dynamics between citizens, representatives of public institutions, and other stakeholders by creating creative and appreciative dialogue on serious issues on local, regional, or even (trans-)national levels.

Theatre-based methods are used to get into the reduction of polarization by constructing new ingroup experiences in a creative communication process that consists of (1) performative elements, including visualisation and sensuality, (2) safe simulation fields, (3) space for autobiographic self-reflection, (4) perspective taken scenic play by forum theatre, and (5) acting and expression through voice. The integrationof manifested conventions is evident and to change someone’s attitude we have to go on this physical level of gesture.

The output of this creative dialog can be used for developing group-self-empowerment. All forms of live encounter foster self-confidence and self-efficacy and therefore provide a strong impact on responsible global democratic citizenship.

Co-creation is fostering the human-to-human-encounter within established power structures and helps to overcome them using the dynamics of meeting in presence and under equals. Participatory action research is an empowerment-tool for democratic agency emphasising especially the empowerment of marginalized individuals. The Bourdieu concept of habitus fits in analysing the criteria of attitude changing. The term habitus can be employed to describe the conventions and attitude of the people when dealing with democratic items.

The presence of manifested habitus in the co-creation processes is evident and the modification of attitudes is an explicit or implicit objective. After all, the interventions described are taking into action the ‚scientific reflexivity and artistic creativity‘ proposed theoretically by Bourdieu as a key tool to the change of (secondary) habitus and strengthening democratic citizenship.