The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics

3 The Requirements of Citizenship

[3] The Requirements of Citizenship In a democratic society, reasonable decisions are preferable to unreasoned ones: considered thought leads to the former, emotions to the latter; therefore deliberation is preferable to visceral reaction as a basis for democratic decision making. —James H. Kuklinski et al., “The Cognitive and Affective Bases of Political Tolerance Judgments” [O]ne should obviously expect an interaction between political sophistication and cognition-driven reasoning, such that the more politically sophisticated citizens are, the more weight they likely attach to abstract cognitive considerations in making up their minds about political choices. —Paul M. Sniderman, Richard A. Brody, and Philip E. Tetlock, Reasoning and Choice he expectations that define a good citizen and the relevant psychological qualities needed to provide the foundations for citizenship have not remained constant over the centuries of the American regime of republican government. The trajectory of the changing conception of citizenship is revealing . The psychology of the good citizen has gone from one that required deference to elite excellence to one that required autonomous consideration by citizens relying on their capacity to reason and deliberate. Thus the celebration of reason, so evident in eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking , is not merely some historical artifact. Rather, reason, as autonomous deliberation, has never been more central to the dominant conceptions of citizenship psychology than it is today.1 And as a result, the apparent inability or unwillingness of the political public to accept the solitary discipline of reason to reach political judgments remains one of the central dilemmas facing social scientists (Elkin & Soltan, eds., 1999) and democratic theorists (Bohman & Rehg, eds., 1997; Elster, ed., 1998). 33 1. As I pointed out earlier, there are theoretical positions that have argued against such singular elevation of reason as the core of citizenship. It is also worth noting that our contemporary grasp of emotion in conventional accounts is much less attentive to the nuances of thought that were common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (S. James 1997). T     What is required of citizens in a liberal democracy? And what role, if any, is emotion expected to play? The idea of citizenship, like the idea of democracy itself (Hanson 1985), has changed over time. Since the time of the founding, attention to and acknowledgment of the necessity of emotion as an essential foundation of citizenship becomes less apparent the closer we get to our current age. Indeed, it can be fairly argued that today emotion is viewed largely as an explicit and central detriment to good citizenship.2 Michael Schudson (1998) has written an engaging history of civic life in the United States from the founding until today. He divides the civic life of America into four periods, each with its own characteristic understanding of what constitutes citizenship. Schudson documents the various changes that have taken place in the meaning and practice of citizenship. And as the possibility of change remains open, one can hope that the problems that result from today’s definition and practices will prove to be impermanent features of today’s democratic politics. He begins his history of civic life with the eighteenth century, the time of the founding, when citizenship was largely a matter of judging character. In the nineteenth century citizens were expected to act as partisan loyalists. By the twentieth century, citizens were to act as autonomous judges. Today citizens are increasingly seen as rights holders and rights claimants. Each view of citizenship is worth some brief attention, especially as it bears on the role of emotion in the proper execution of the role of citizen as then defined. In the late eighteenth century, the principal task of the Founding Fathers was to ensure that the citizens would freely endorse the legitimacy of the government. Who would be likely to constitute that government was well understood by everyone. George Washington would be the first president, with other luminaries to await their turn. Who would take up seats in the House and Senate was also largely foreordained. The elect in politics would be chosen among those who had succeeded in life in each locale and, it was expected, had demonstrated a suitable concern for the public welfare.3 Who should demonstrate positive allegiance was also defined. Only   sentimental  2. Today’s dominant theoretical account, the rational choice model, provides for emotion only as stable desires (preferences), which are now thought to be stable “self-interests.” And, as I noted before, this is a very limited acknowledgment indeed, given the substantial impact of emotion on...