Citizenship After the Nation State (CANS)

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Citizenship After the Nation State (CANS) examines the multi-level nature of citizenship. The intellectual project seeks to identify the way that individuals define communities of solidarity at different territorial scales (local, regional, state and continental), the perceived importance of government decisions or citizen participation at different levels of government and the conditions under which regional or supra-state communities or policy communities become important sites of citizenship for individuals that might rival the state as the 'natural' site of citizenship. The research contributes directly to debates about the territorial rescaling of political life, as well as feeds into UK debates about the impact of devolution on policy variation and political participation.CANS will test hypotheses about the impact of independent variables such as territorial identities, government structures and actual/perceived wealth. For example we will test whether stronger regional identity, a regional government that is perceived to be stronger and greater perceived regional wealth make one more likely to identify with a regional community of solidarity or more likely to participate in regional politics. We will explore relationships at the local, regional, state and continental level but our primary focus is the extent to which we can speak of regionalised citizenship. We will employ multi-level methods of analysis, so that we can identify with precision the impact of individual perceptions of, for example, regional legislative competence, and actual regional authority. The network builds on an existing partnership across five states (Austria, France, Germany, Spain, UK) and brings in new expertise and new country partners (Belgium, Canada, Hungary, Netherlands, Sweden, US). The goal of the network is to submit funding applications to facilitate a cross-national regional-level survey of multi-level citizenship attitudes and behaviour, creating an unprecedented data resource for students and researchers. The network will fund meetings among applicants to identify best practice in regional cross-national surveys, best practice impact and knowledge exchange opportunities and identify state-of-the-art research on specific elements as yet under-explored in the UK political science literature such as cosmopolitan cities and immigration, regional economics and trust. The network will hold a PhD summer school with participants from the eleven partner countries (and two from the UK). Each student will be paired with an academic from another institution, facilitating a year-long mentoring relationship that will encourage greater use of the existing CANS dataset, related discrete datasets and will result in a showcase summer school in which students may present their research findings and build networks among their peers.