The Good Citizen By Russell Dalton: Chapter Analysis

In chapter 9 of The Good Citizen, Russell Dalton (2009) compares the effects of the shift in citizenship norms in the United States and in the other advanced industrial democracies based on three political aspects: participation, tolerance and democratic values. Two couple of terms of duty based citizenship and engaged citizen are consistently used in this chapter to illustrate the changes in political cultures of not only the America but also other advanced democratic countries. Duty based citizenship poses images of the individuals who conservatively believe that heavy-duty activities such as voting, paying tax or obeying the law would be measurement of a healthy democracy (Dalton, 2009). Meanwhile, engaged citizenship is grouping people who get involved in politics in more assertive approaches which tend to pose more challenges to their …show more content…
The first pattern that Dalton (2009, 145) found is that there is a decrease in duty citizenship norm among younger generations in both the U.S. and other compared democracies . The statistics that Dalton (2009, 145) presented even show a sharper decline in norms of citizen duty in the other democratic nations than in the America. The second pattern suggests that changes in engaged citizenship norm in the U.S. and other democracies are slightly different (Dalton, 2009, 145). Even though the norm of engaged citizenship in the America is significantly increasing over the generational shift, this trend in other democratic nations shows less remarkable changes (Dalton, 2009, 146). Therefore, the two patterns have captured not only the general similarities but also the detailed differences between American politics and other democracies’ politics, which make Dalton’s comparisons in this chapter academically