Four models of citizenship : from authoritarianism to consumer citizenship

In this discussion I argue that with economic globalization and the development of neo-liberal strategies the various forms of citizenship have converged onto a market model of passive consumer citizenship in which the state has curtailed entitlements and withdrawn from the provision of social security, and civil-society institutions have been eroded. The market rather than civil society institutions have been eroded. The market rather than civil society has become the institutional setting for citizenship. The result is the emergence of the a-political, isolated and passive citizen as consumer and it can be claimed that participation in market economics has become the sine qua non of citizenship in those countries with de-regulated economies. The consumer citizen is the product of a leisure society in which the ‘virtue’ of the citizen is measured by their taste for luxury goods. Such a society inevitably produced an under-class of poorly educated and unemployed people whose consumption is confined to cheap goods and basic needs. The irony of a leisure society is that with very low minimum wages citizens have to work long hours to purchase necessities. This paper assesses the significance of this trend towards consumerism, and the extent to which it is contested in the context of Latin America.