Citizenship Concepts in Political Sociology: From Legal Status to Civic Virtue

Citizenship is one of those concepts that sounds straightforward until you start pulling at its threads. Is it just a passport? A set of legal rights? A moral commitment to the community you live in? In political sociology, citizenship is understood as far more than a document issued by the state. It is a dynamic relationship between individuals and the political community they belong to – one shaped by history, power, class, and ongoing struggles for inclusion. From the city-states of ancient Greece to the welfare states of the twentieth century and the digitally connected world of today, citizenship has continuously evolved in meaning and scope.

What citizenship actually means 🔗

At its most basic level, citizenship refers to the formal legal status of belonging to a particular nation-state. This status grants individuals the right to live and work in a country, vote in elections, and receive protection under its laws. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, citizenship involves three interconnected dimensions: a legal dimension (the formal rules about who qualifies and what it entails), a political dimension (participation in governance through voting and civic engagement), and an identity dimension (the sense of belonging to a shared political community).

Legal citizenship is typically acquired in one of two ways: through jus soli (birthright citizenship based on place of birth) or jus sanguinis (citizenship by descent). Many countries also offer pathways to naturalization, allowing immigrants to become citizens after meeting residency and other requirements. But it is important to note that as scholars at the Migration Policy Institute point out, becoming a citizen is often less pressing to migrants than simply gaining admission and the right to work – suggesting that the formal legal status of citizenship does not always capture what people actually value about membership in a society.

Beyond its legal definition, citizenship has historically carried a strong moral and normative dimension. ScienceDirect’s overview of social citizenship describes citizenship as having a twofold structure: a legally defined status on one hand, and a philosophical ideal of “good” civic behavior on the other. This idea that citizenship involves not just rights but also virtues and responsibilities is central to political sociology.

Historical roots: from the Greek polis to the modern state 🔗

The origins of citizenship as an active political role go back to ancient Greece. In the Athenian polis, citizens were expected to participate directly in public life – voting in assemblies, serving on juries, and holding public office. As Wikipedia’s entry on civic virtue notes, Aristotle’s Politics viewed citizenship as consisting not primarily of political rights but of political duties – citizens were expected to set aside private interests and serve the state according to law. This classical model saw civic participation as a source of honor and moral virtue.

Rome expanded this model geographically, extending citizenship to conquered peoples as a tool of political integration. But in doing so, it shifted citizenship away from active political agency and toward a more passive legal status – a pattern that would repeat itself in later centuries. As Wikipedia’s article on citizenship explains, historically most populations were subjects rather than citizens, and citizenship was a particular status that originated in the rights of urban populations in cities and republics.

The modern concept of citizenship began to crystallize in the early modern period, alongside the rise of capitalism and the nation-state. The great democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century – the American and French Revolutions – framed citizenship in terms of universal rights, though in practice those rights were initially restricted to propertied men. It was through successive social and political struggles – by the working class, women, and racial minorities – that citizenship was gradually broadened.

T. H. Marshall’s framework: civil, political, and social rights 🔗

No discussion of citizenship in political sociology is complete without engaging with the work of T. H. Marshall. In his landmark 1949 essay “Citizenship and Social Class”, Marshall argued that citizenship in modern Britain had evolved through three distinct phases, each associated with a different bundle of rights.

Civil rights: the eighteenth century 🔗

The first stage involved the development of civil rights in the eighteenth century. These are the rights necessary to secure individual freedom: liberty of the person, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to own property, the right to enter into contracts, and the right to justice before the law. As Marshall’s framework is explained in detail, civil rights were foundational to the competitive market economy of capitalism – they enabled individuals to act as free and independent economic agents. Importantly, this also meant that the structural inequalities produced by capitalism were initially left largely unchallenged by citizenship.

Political rights: the nineteenth century 🔗

The second stage involved the extension of political rights in the nineteenth century – chiefly the right to vote and stand for political office. According to Britannica’s profile of Marshall, this phase did not involve creating new rights so much as extending old rights to new sections of the population. Universal adult franchise in England was not fully achieved until 1918. Marshall saw political rights as building upon the foundation of civil rights, deepening the principle of equality that citizenship had begun to establish.

Social rights: the twentieth century 🔗

The third and most ambitious stage involved the emergence of social rights in the twentieth century. Marshall defined social rights as encompassing everything from the right to basic economic welfare and security to the right to participate fully in the social heritage of a civilized society. In practice, social rights meant access to public education, healthcare, housing, and social insurance – the hallmarks of the modern welfare state. Crucially, Marshall argued that social rights were granted not on the basis of class or need, but on the basis of citizenship status itself. This was a radical break from earlier practices where state assistance came with a loss of civil or political standing.

As Dissent Magazine’s analysis of Marshall’s essay highlights, the institutions underpinning each dimension of citizenship are distinct but interrelated: courts uphold civil liberties, elections to a legislature express political rights, and welfare systems deliver public education and healthcare as social rights. Together, these three elements constitute what Marshall understood as full citizenship.

Citizenship and class: a tension at the heart of capitalism 🔗

One of Marshall’s most significant observations was about the tension between citizenship and capitalism. On one hand, civil rights had helped build the market economy by protecting individual freedom and contract. On the other hand, the progressive expansion of social rights challenged the class inequalities that the market produced. As Marshall himself noted, citizenship functioned to contain the conflicts between social classes within welfare capitalism – it was both a product of that system and a check on its excesses.

This tension has never been fully resolved. Neo-liberal critics of Marshall’s framework argue that welfare programs foster dependency and undermine individual initiative, while defenders of social citizenship respond that without guaranteed social rights, civil and political rights remain hollow for those without the resources to exercise them. The debate between these positions remains at the center of contemporary welfare state politics.

Marshall’s framework has also been criticized for other reasons. Feminist scholars point out that Marshall’s account was centered on the experiences of white working-class men, ignoring the very different trajectories of women and racial minorities in acquiring citizenship rights. His assumption that rights progress in a fixed order – civil, then political, then social – has also been challenged by the experiences of postcolonial and developing nations, where the sequencing has often been quite different.

From civic virtue to civic obligation 🔗

Alongside the rights-based dimension of citizenship sits the equally important question of civic virtue – what citizens owe to their political community, not just what the state owes them. Civic virtue refers to the habits, values, and attitudes that promote the general welfare and the effective functioning of society. It involves placing the common good above narrow self-interest – a disposition that republican political traditions, from Aristotle to Rousseau, have considered essential to any healthy democracy.

In practice, civic virtue includes behaviors like participating in elections, staying informed about public affairs, paying taxes, engaging in community service, and respecting the rights of fellow citizens. Research published in PMC underscores that an ideal citizen is one who possesses rights and freedoms and, while pursuing their own interests, also respects the rights and freedoms of others and upholds loyalty to the law. This is the moral dimension of citizenship – citizenship not just as a legal status but as a set of lived practices and ethical commitments.

The balance between rights and obligations is one of the persistent tensions within citizenship theory. Too much emphasis on obligations, some argue, risks turning citizenship into a tool of social control. Too little, and citizenship degenerates into passive consumerism – citizens as mere recipients of state services rather than active participants in shared governance.

Citizenship in the modern state: evolving functions and policies 🔗

The relationship between citizenship and state functions has shifted considerably in recent decades. The post-World War II welfare state – which Marshall’s framework helped to theorize – assumed a relatively closed national system in which the state could provide comprehensive social protections to its citizens. Contemporary scholarship published by Palgrave Macmillan identifies three major challenges now facing citizenship: the crisis of democracy marked by the rise of populism, economic inequalities deepened by market dynamics and austerity, and the pressures of globalization that limit the capacity of nation-states to govern cross-border issues.

Globalization in particular has complicated the traditional model of citizenship in profound ways. A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Sociology highlights how transnational migration has produced new forms of belonging that do not fit neatly within national frameworks – including dual citizenship, transnationalism, and what researchers call the “double presence” of migrants who live meaningfully in both their country of origin and their country of residence. The Migration Policy Institute notes that the growing acceptance of dual citizenship and noncitizen rights has made the acquisition of formal citizenship less pressing for many migrants, while also reinvigorating debates about national loyalty in the context of rising nativism.

Recent scholarship on cultural citizenship, published in Sociology Compass, has pushed the concept further still – arguing that citizenship must be understood not just as a legal status but as a site of cultural struggle over social inclusion and exclusion. This includes questions of belonging for minority communities whose formal legal citizenship may coexist with everyday experiences of marginalization and non-recognition.

The liberal and republican models: two visions of citizenship 🔗

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies two foundational models that structure debates about citizenship. The liberal model centers on individual rights – citizenship as a bundle of legal protections that allow individuals to pursue their own lives and goals free from state interference. The republican model, with roots in Aristotle, Cicero, and Rousseau, centers on civic self-rule – citizenship as active participation in the governance of the community, with obligations to the common good that go beyond simply claiming rights.

These two visions are not entirely opposed, but they generate very different policy emphases. A liberal approach tends to stress the protection of individual civil liberties and property rights. A republican approach tends to stress the importance of political participation, civic education, and active engagement in public life. Marshall’s framework, with its attention to both rights and the social conditions necessary for their meaningful exercise, occupies a middle ground between these traditions.

Citizenship today: rights, belonging, and new frontiers 🔗

The concept of citizenship continues to evolve. Digital technology has opened new forms of political participation – online activism, petitions, social media advocacy – while also raising new questions about privacy, surveillance, and access. The concept of global citizenship, promoted by organizations like UNESCO and embedded in the UN’s Education 2030 Framework, emphasizes values of empathy, solidarity, and shared responsibility that transcend national borders. Yet, as critics note, global citizenship remains largely aspirational – it lacks the concrete legal and institutional mechanisms that make national citizenship meaningful.

What remains constant across all these transformations is the core insight that citizenship is never simply a passive status. It is a relationship – between the individual and the state, between the individual and their fellow citizens, and between the present generation and the political communities they inherit and reshape. Whether we understand that relationship primarily through the lens of rights, obligations, virtue, identity, or social belonging, citizenship remains one of the most fundamental questions in political sociology.

What do you think? As globalization blurs national borders and digital spaces create new forms of civic engagement, should citizenship remain anchored to the nation-state – or is it time for legal frameworks to catch up with the reality of transnational lives? And looking at Marshall’s three-part framework, do you think social rights – access to healthcare, education, and welfare – are truly secure today, or are they being quietly eroded?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship/
2. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/citizenship-globalized-world
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/social-citizenship
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_virtue
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship
6. https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-H-Marshall
7. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/soc15/chapter/t-h-marshall-citizenship-and-social-class/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._H._Marshall
9. https://dissentmagazine.org/article/t-h-marshalls-citizenship-and-social-class/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.H._Marshall's_Social_Citizenship
11. https://www.ukessays.com/essays/social-policy/th-marshalls-theory-of-citizenship.php
12. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12024186/
13. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-99359-6_1
14. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1568332/full
15. https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.12415
16. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7871750/