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It is a fundamental ideal of liberal democracy that all citizens should enjoy fully equal citizenship. Yet many minorities are still routinely ignored, excluded, patronized, and not regarded as full members of the political community. This denial of equal standing undermines their equal citizenship. Liberalism and Cultural Pluralism each advocate strategies to improve this situation. Their arguments build upon expectations about how citizens should, can, and do understand membership in the political community. Our survey and focus group data from six matched communities in the United States and Great Britain show how citizens’ understandings of membership in the political community incorporate communitarian attitudes that impede the liberal and cultural pluralist projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The civic side of citizenship in Great Britain and the United States is the central concern of the research programme on which we report. We seek to expand the scope of research on citizenship in political behaviour and political psychology, and to expand the range of the methodologies that are used to study this subject. Hence, we have been: (a) pursuing new topics such as conceptions of rights, duties, identities, civility, civic engagement and democratic deliberation; (b) examining such topics from the perspective of normatively-oriented explanations derived from recent debates in political theory; and (c) exploring the utility of new types of data to supplement our work with survey research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]