Democratic Citizenship and Digital Technologies: A Conceptual Map

Democratic citizenship in modern Western societies includes civic, political, and social dimensions (Marshall 1949), the relative importance of which liberal, republican, communitarian, and deliberative conceptions of citizenship assess differently (cf. Forst 2002). This paper adopts a deliberative conception of democratic citizenship that assigns equal importance to both personal and political autonomy, which the civic, political, and social dimensions of citizenship support in various ways (cf. Habermas 1994, 1996). Based on this deliberative conception, this paper aims to improve our understanding of the relevant empirical and normative relationships between democratic citizenship and digital technologies given that, until very recently, the scholarship on these relationships has been excessively polarized. On the one hand, “technological optimists” have praised the empowering effects of digital technologies on democratic citizenship. They have highlighted the creation of digital commons (Benkler 2006), the near zero-costs of digitally publicizing one’s view (Shirky 2008), the increased possibilities of (non-elite) cultural and political expression (Kahne, Middaugh, and Allen 2015), the intensification of transnational interconnectedness and cosmopolitan concern (Parham and Allen 2015), the mass-mobilization capacities of social media (Zuckerman 2015), and new forms of “liquid” democracy and e-voting (Kron 2012). On the other hand, however, “technological pessimists” have criticized that the cultures of “technological solutionism” and convenience hallow out citizens’ capacity to solve complex social problems (Morozov 2013, Wu 2018), that the constant surveillance through digital technologies undermine citizens’ privacy and freedom (Zuboff 2015, O’Neill 2022), that the use of social media would render citizens’ addicted, inauthentic, and extremist (Lanier 2018), that technological processes of singularization make it more difficult for citizens to find common ground (Reckwitz 2020), and that the interlacements of financialized capitalism and digital technologies breed resentment and populism (Vogl 2021). As of late, however, a more balanced scholarship on the relationships between democratic citizenship and digital technologies has emerged (Cohen and Fung 2021, Farrel and Schwartzberg 2021, Ford 2021). This latest literature aims to avoid the optimists’ naïve enthusiasm and the pessimists’ defeatism – both of which are one-sided. It does so by drawing on the ways in which digital technologies, cultural habits, legal regulation, and political practice can be, and have already been, adapted to respond to the problems that digital technologies pose for democratic citizenship, yet without neglecting or underestimating the costs of such adaptation. The paper follows this literature’s approach and argues that both the optimists and the pessimists suffer from impoverished understandings of the relationships between democratic citizenship and digital technologies. This is because they do not distinguish carefully enough between agential and structural aspects of citizenship, between local, national, and transnational scales of citizenship, and between civic, political, and social dimensions of citizenship. In short, they lack a conceptual map including the various aspects, scales, and dimensions of democratic citizenship and their relationships to digital technology. Therefore, the paper develops such a conceptual map and thereby facilitates a more fine-grained empirical inquiry and normative assessment of the multiple relationships between democratic citizenship and digital technologies.