ABSTRACT
Participatory citizenship education (PCE) strives to encourage young people to be actively engaged in social and political affairs. It is aimed at educating the democratic citizen. Programmes have been set up to support teachers and other practitioners to promote the willingness of young people to be active and participatory. Regarding its programmatic character, PCE is a rather ambivalent practice. It occurs as a top-down policy by ‘the state’ which summons citizens to question, at least partly, existing institutions in order to revamp and sustain their democratic character. Thereby, state institutions aim to enhance diffuse support and strengthen the established system of political rule. Thus, PCE is a twofold exercise encompassing both emancipative activation as well as social engineering which aims to bring forth opportunistic citizens. PCE is aimed at educating young people in a specific way. It strives to constitute a particular conception of a ‘participative citizen’. The ambivalent intervention from above should result in a specified governmentality, i.e. a particular conduct of the self (Dean 1999; Miller and Rose 2008). The attitudes and perceptions, i.e. the mindset of the subjects to be governed, should include a willingness to participate and the acceptance of the institutions being established. Hence, PCE’s conception encompasses particular skills and requirements which will be described in the following. In addition, PCE sets up a governmentality which does not assure but is likely to be confronted with failures. Democratic participation in particular entails dissatisfaction because democracy is a promise that will be broken. Dissatisfaction with the idea of democracy derives from both the inherent deficiencies of “models of democracy” (Held 2006) and the shortcomings within current political systems, be it “post-democracies” (Crouch 2004) or “constitutional anomy” (Flinders 2010).
