The New Right Conception of Citizenship and the Citizen's Charter

Bibliographic Data

ID6267799
AuthorsR Bellamy (0000-0002-9823-0626), John Greenaway
Year1995
Volume30
Issue4
Pages469-491
Publication date1995-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGovernment and Opposition (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0017-257X • E-ISSN: 1477-7053
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/j.1477-7053.1995.tb00139.x
OpenAlexW2125517801
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited8

MANY COMMENTATORS HAVE VIEWED THE CITIZEN'S CHARTER programme as a cynical exercise, having little to do with either the political participation one associates with citizenship or the establishment of a general bill of rights in the manner of the great Charters of the past. Although these criticisms possess some force, they fail to recognize that a distinctive conception of citizenship and rights underlies the initiative. In section one, we give an outline of this view of the citizen and trace its origins in the New Right critique of the social-democratic theory that predominated during the post-war period. This exercise forms a necessary preliminary both for understanding the objectives of the policy, the task of section two, and for assessing its coherence and plausibility, the aim of section three. We shall conclude that the scheme fails because it either substitutes the market for the state where it is inappropriate or omits to do so where it might provejustified. In these respects, the combination of politics and markets from the mixed-economy perspective of the social democratic conception of citizenship may well be superior

Charter · Citizenship · Democracy · Good citizenship · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Section (typography · Sociology · State (computer science · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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