The Shifting Sands of Citizenship

Politics as the Personal: Life Politics

Contemporary politics reflects many postindustrial characteristics, including the declining power of large, formal, and traditional institutions, such as political parties, trade unions, and governments (Dalton 2000; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Citizens have become less involved in traditional, hierarchical political organizations (Inglehart 1997). The number of citizens who consider themselves “independent” has grown along with the level of dissatisfaction with governments and political parties (Dalton 2000). As society has become more diverse in terms of demographics and occupations, it is almost impossible to find a common interest, single ideology, or big agenda that concerns every citizen. Rather, various pluralistic, postmaterialistic, value-laden, lifestyle-choice issues previously regarded as social or cultural concerns (e.g., abortion, sexual orientation, gender, racial conflict, and science and environmental issues) have surged to the foreground (Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox 1994). There are now infinite possibilities in terms of the types of issues that come forward in politics. Giddens (1991) terms this political phenomenon—the rise of personal choice matters in the political realm—life politics.

Life politics concerns the politics of choice and the politics of life decisions (Giddens 1991). The power of political decision-making comes from the informed choices that individuals make concerning their own lives and long-term, lifetime consequences. For instance, day-to-day consumption choices reflect long-term environmental concerns; the policy debates on science and technology have direct consequences on one’s life. Life politics issues include choices on pregnancy and reproduction (or abortion), genetically treated food (or organic food), and products using nanotechnology. Life politics involves how individuals make decisions that directly affect their own lives, but it also involves the values and ethical principles in their lifestyle choices. In this sense, life politics is about the creation of a morally justifiable life that promotes self-actualization (Giddens 1991). It brings the personal lives of individuals to the forefront of politics and emphasizes selfhood, identity, and values: “The personal is political” (Giddens 1991).

However, life politics goes beyond the simple politicization of a personal agenda. Life politics covers more than selfishness or self-indulgence. Although it centers on the self-actualization of identity, life politics involves the remoralization of life issues and negotiations that citizens with different social backgrounds face. The life choices that individuals make each day—for instance, whether to recycle, to drive, to purchase locally produced food—are personal, but also collective. In environmental politics, for example, personal choice matters are organized and manifested as collective action, which challenges institutions and systems. In this sense, life politics means the return of an institutionally marginalized agenda, but one that demands a public and institutional sensitivity to those issues. Thus, life politics calls for the reconfiguration of political endeavors; life politics inherently involves collective struggles, public debate, and institutions (Furgerson 2001), as new links are forged between personal and collective identities, private and public domains, and micro and macro levels.

The Citizenry in Life Politics: The Extension of Issue Publics in Contemporary Politics

Life politics has important implications for discussing the notion of the citizenry in contemporary politics. First, as life politics emphasizes the demise of dichotomous ideologies (capitalism versus socialism, or liberalism versus socialism) and the rise of pluralistic, diverse, lifestyle concerns and value systems, the contemporary citizenry in life politics must encompass diverse political concerns and the pluralistic nature of citizenship. Variations in personal interests in life politics suggest the existence of systematically different subgroups with diverse values, identities, and interests within the population. Those groups cannot be simply aggregated to the general public or reduced to atomized individuals. Second, by definition, life politics implies citizens’ deep commitment to life-choice issues that have long-term consequences on their own lives. Thus, contemporary citizenship must embody individual, strong personal commitments to particular issues. Third, as life politics blurs the distinction between the state and the market, citizens and consumers, collective and personal, and public and private domains, the contemporary notion of the citizenry must encapsulate the dubious nature of citizenry: that is, the personal yet political aspect of citizenship and its manifestation in citizen engagement. This suggests that we should develop an intermediary conceptualization of citizenship to adequately understand contemporary politics. Contemporary citizenry is something private yet public, personal yet collective. It involves “citizens” existing within the state boundaries, but they are also “consumers” defined by the market. It exists on both micro and macro levels.

The characteristics of contemporary citizenry highlighted by life politics indeed draw attention to one of the classical models of the citizenry in political science: the concept of issue publics (Almond 1950; Converse 1964). The notion of issue publics was introduced by Converse (1964) as an auxiliary concept in his attempt to explain the puzzling variability in attitudes and behavior within the public. Converse noted that the variability appeared to be driven by sharp divisions of interest among the public. Individuals appear to have different levels of attachment to different issues. Similarly, in explaining the multiplicity of the public, Almond (1950) emphasized that there are significant variations in the size and composition of publics associated with various issues/problems. The level of political interest indeed varies across the spectrum of social problems; thus, political engagement also fluctuates depending on the organization of issue interests.

The theoretical concept of issue publics is still underdeveloped, but recent research attempts to extend both theoretical and empirical explanations for the existence of issue publics in the changing political environment. Defining issue publics as those who consider particular issues personally important, Kim’s (2009) research strongly supports the existence of issue publics and provides empirical evidence from both national surveys and a field experiment. First, Kim found that there was no overlap between multiple issue interests, confirming that individuals have distinctive interests in various issues. Second, according to Kim, most individuals (90.8 percent) exhibited a high level of interest in at least one issue, illustrating the existence of issue publics who expressed a strong commitment to an issue. Third, her research showed that, on average, individuals were interested in fewer than two issues, indicating that issue publics should be distinguished from “elites,” “experts,” or “attentive publics” who have a mastery over multiple political issues (Zaller 1992). Kim confirmed specific issue interests were not necessarily correlated with “conventional predictors” of general political engagement, such as general political interests, general political knowledge, or level of educational attainment.

Recent research explains that membership in an issue public, which is most effectively measured by personal issue importance (see Krosnick 1990), is inherently personal and intrinsic (Kim 2007). For example, even though the majority of the population considers the issue of national defense the most important issue for the country as a whole, individuals do not necessarily consider this issue personally important unless they subjectively value the issue. Issue public membership is also subjectively determined in that individuals can attach importance to an issue that does not directly center on self-interest. Members of issue publics care deeply about a few issues while attaching little significance to other issues. The notion of issue publics assumes that most individuals have few resources or little motivation to carefully attend to all the important issues; the information cost associated with becoming fully informed is substantial. Thus, individuals form attitudes based on an issue that they care about personally.

However, membership in issue publics does not imply the collapse of collective identity or a reduction of public domains to private domains. The factors that guide the attitudes and behaviors of the members of issue publics include not only one’s self-interest (i.e., direct consequences for an individual’s life; see Boninger et al. 1995) and value systems, but also social and collective identity (Boninger et al. 1995). Research on issue publics makes it clear that when issue publics consider issues personally important, the “personal importance” represents both the personal and the collective. For example, research has found that those who are concerned with the issue of gun control are guided by their own past or likely future experiences with guns and crime as well as the experiences of their social reference groups (Boninger et al. 1995). Collective identity (i.e., feeling connected to others who share the same values) with an environmental issue is an important predictor of individuals’ participation in the environmental movement (see, for example, Simon et al. 1998). Moral and ethical concerns about political consumerism guides which issues individuals consistently consider important in a value system.

Guided by self-interest, values, and social identity, individuals who consider particular issues personally important are strikingly consistent and strong in their issue attitudes. Herzog’s (1993) in-depth interviews with those concerned with animal rights reveal that the individuals concerned with special interests constantly think and talk about the issues. They try to convince others to adopt their issue attitudes and even lose friends and spouses as a result of their deep involvement in the issues. These individuals, indeed, engage in the “politics of personal interests” actively, with conviction. In support of this, recent research shows that although members of issue publics do not have a mastery of politics, they tend to hold a high level of domain-specific knowledge (Kim 2007, 2009) and exhibit consistent, extreme, and polarized attitudes about the issue of concern (Krosnick 1990; Kim 2007, 2008, 2009). Furthermore, they actively engage in issue-specific political action (Becker et al. 2010). Members’ level of general political knowledge is not necessarily high, and they do not necessarily participate in conventional forms of political action; however, they passionately engage in and exert significant influences on politics in regard to the issues of their personal concern.

Although the two concepts have evolved in different research contexts, life politics and issue publics share important theoretical underpinnings: the pluralistic and diverse array of political (and personal) ideals, the foreground of the personal in politics, and the intermediary understanding of publics or citizenship. Kim (2007, 2008, 2009) argues that the concept of issue publics has become increasingly relevant to understanding the changes contemporary politics has undergone over the past few decades. Issue publics’ strong personal attachment to particular issues, for instance, appears to describe especially well the emerging forms of civic engagement that are manifested in various contexts of life politics: political consumerism, identity politics, green politics, and bioethical politics. Empirical observations of issue publics, indeed, have become more apparent in certain issue domains than others in contemporary politics. For example, Yeager and his colleagues (2011) reveal the existence of a large climate issue public (15 percent of Americans) who care deeply about “green politics.” Similarly, Dunlap (2010) found that 15 to 20 percent of Americans identify themselves as “active environmentalists.” Kim (2009) further explored these issues by comparing multiple issue publics in terms of “domain-specificity effects”—selective information search, domain-specific knowledge, issue extremity, and polarization. Kim found that domain-specificity effects were higher in the case of so-called social, identity, and lifestyle issues that used to be largely marginalized by traditional political institutions (e.g., abortion, affirmative action, and environment issues) compared to “mainstream” political issues, such as the economy and education. The politics of such social, identity, and lifestyle issues encompass life politics—the actualization of self, values, and identities and the development of morals and ethics concerning these issues (Giddens 1991)—in other words, how we live our day-to-day lives. Issues such as abortion, gay marriage, gun control, taxes, and climate change become “social identity markers” (Nisbet 2011), and those markers strongly influence information consumption, communication, consumer choices, and everyday lifestyle choices in contemporary politics.

Why Now? The New Media Environment and the Reconfiguration of Political Communication

The notion of issue publics was introduced more than half a century ago. So why now do we observe the rise of issue publics in various life-choice issue domains? Why does this concept draw attention and become increasingly relevant to understanding contemporary politics? I argue that the current political and media environments set the ecological conditions for the reconfiguration of political communication at multiple levels, which in turn facilitates the development of issue publics.

We should first note that the power of traditional political institutions has continually declined (Dalton 2000; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Citizens have become less involved in traditional, hierarchical political institutions (Inglehart 1997). The simple ideological dichotomy (i.e., capitalism versus socialism) has given way to a multiplicity of ideologies (Beck 1999; Giddens 1991).

More importantly, however, our current media environment has undergone significant changes, which, in turn, exert great influences onto the politics of the personal. Digital technologies make information more universally accessible, narrowing the gap between the resource-rich and the resource-poor. Increased user controllability and content specialization not only enable individuals to find specific information in a highly selective manner, but they also allow political elites to tailor messages to specific groups and selectively target the individuals in these groups who have a high likelihood of responding to the messages. User-generated, shared networks not only render a wide range of information publicly available, but they also blur the distinction between the public and private domains. Now, individuals routinely and habitually share private information without knowing exactly who might use this information.

The increasing adoption of entertainment-oriented, culture-infused, and personalized media is another important aspect of the changes in the media environment. In this fragmented media environment, soft, personality-oriented, and human-interest-oriented entertainment media formats appeal strongly to committed media consumers, lowering the barrier to expanding connections with these consumers. The convergence between politics and entertainment not only attracts audiences previously alienated from conventional forms of political involvement (e.g., young voters), but also provides affective intelligence that is vital to maintaining political engagement (Kim and Vishak 2008; van Zoonen 2005). Thus, the distinctions between private and public domains become blurred. Jones (2004) explains that “new political television” (especially comedy shows) has shifted the political epistemology of citizens, rejecting the traditional paradigm of political authority and embracing a paradigm of open-ended, experiential, and lay knowledge of politics. “Personal” interests based on self-interests, identities, and values become the guideline in citizens’ engagement in political decisions. Citizens’ political epistemology has changed, defining politics as the “personal.” We now see systematically different, diverse, pluralistic subgroups that personally care about life choice issues exerting substantial influence in politics.

The shift in citizenship, however, cannot be simply reduced to individualized phenomena, because such changes have resulted from the reconfiguration of political communication at multiple levels. The changes in the political environment and media environment—the rise of personal interests in politics; the development of affordable, interactive, specialized media; and the adoption of culturally infused, personalized formats—indeed set the ecological conditions for the reconfiguration of political communication at the individual, group, and elite levels. The reconfiguration process includes political elites and advocacy groups’ selective targeting, niche media selection, strategic polarization, as well as individuals’ selective and personalized information gathering.

The influences of the new media environment on selectivity have been relatively well explained at the individual level. The new media environment significantly increases individuals’ important selective exposure to issue-relevant information, especially those who consider particular issues personally important (Kim 2007, 2008, 2009). Whereas traditional media in the broadcast era centered on common denominators and the majority’s interests (which meant that members of “marginalized” latent issue publics had difficulties finding issue-specific information), the current media environment provides more opportunities for selective information gathering for latent issue publics. When members of latent issue publics have the opportunity to find information relevant to their political decisions, they tend to selectively attend to the issue of concern, even though the utility of such information selection is relatively low (Kim 2007, 2008, 2009). Unless an extrinsic motivation for accuracy is introduced, when given a choice members of issue publics narrowly select information relevant to the issue of their concern (Kim 2007). Members of issue publics also prefer communication channels that allow them to selectively attend to information that is relevant to the issue of concern (Kim 2009). Selective information gathering indeed leads latent issue publics to become active in the domains of special interest to them. Kim (2009) shows that latent issue publics select information online that concerns their special interests, but not other issues, which in turn increases the level of domain-specific political knowledge, leading to extremity in issue attitudes. As a result of this process, the gap between issue publics and nonissue publics widens, leading to issue polarization. In the current media context, where broadcasting and postbroadcasting media coexist, the lack of issue information in broadcasting media facilitates the selective information gathering of latent issue publics via subsequent digital media use (Kim 2008). The new media environment also offers an array of customizable tools and culture-infused media formats for latent issue publics to find personal relevance in their own way (Bennett and Segerberg 2011). Bennett (this volume) clearly explains how culture-fused media and personalized messages facilitate individuals’ personalization of the relevance of politics. All these media forms would help individuals think about the relevance of personal life choices and their political implications.

However, latent issue publics’ selective information gathering tells us only half of the story. Kim (n.d.) argues that without “middle men” who mobilize interest and organize collective action, issue publics would not arise and become active in life politics. Similarly, Giddens (1991) underscores the influence of institutions (more specifically, groups and organizations) in life politics, especially the role of social movements in actualizing personal interests. Kim asserts that the selectivity of advocacy groups and political elites (that is, selective targeting, selective media choices, and strategic polarization) are important building blocks for the facilitation of issue publics in the context of life politics.

By targeting distinctively segmented audiences and by adopting more personality styles, political elites do not simply go public to gain the middle ground but also go “into” the public to consolidate support from allies, establishing a clear identity with respect to a variety of issues that distinguishes them from their opposition (Kim, Shen, and Dylko 2008). Research has clearly demonstrated that political elites have increasingly organized issue conflicts and that elite polarization (especially in regard to social issues such as abortion, gay rights, and racial matters) is much greater than it was 40 years ago (e.g., Layman, Carsey, and Horowitz 2006; Nivola and Brady 2008). Issue advocacy groups have also become substantially more polarized in their issue positions (McCluskey and Kim 2010) and have increasingly focused on organizing collective action among latent issue publics who hold special issue concerns (Kim et al. 2010). Kim and colleagues (2010) find that issue advocacy groups facilitate information-rich, grassroots-oriented public mobilization (i.e., informational mobilization and participatory mobilization) more than ever before and that there seems to be a shift in the focus of advocacy groups’ strategic activities from traditional, inside lobbying to public mobilization, even among mainstream issue interest groups. Kim and her colleagues (Kim and McCluskey 2009; Kim et al., 2010; Min and Kim 2012) attribute these trends to the adoption of “niche media” (especially digital communication technologies) based on empirical evidence indicating consistent positive associations between the adoption of various digital technologies and groups’ public mobilization activities. This is true even after controlling for organizational resources and institutionalization factors (e.g., total revenue, history, location in Washington, D.C., formal membership, dues collection, and political action committees). Kim and colleagues (Kim and McCluskey 2009; Kim et al. 2010; Min and Kim 2012) explain that the technological attributes of digital media—the lower cost of collective action, increased availability of information, increased identification with issues, and blurred distinction between public and private—may have contributed to groups’ public mobilization and organization of collective action. Min and Kim (2012) support this idea by showing that groups clearly understand the utility of niche media in public mobilization.

The reconfiguration of political communication via selectivity appears to facilitate pluralistic groups of people who personally care about particular lifestyle issues. Selective media choices, selective targeting, and strategic divergence toward attitude extremes embraced by both political elites and advocacy groups should interdependently influence citizens’ selective, personalized information gathering, which, in turn, should activate latent issue publics and facilitate the development of issue publics in life politics.

Conclusion

By explaining emerging patterns in contemporary politics, this article revisits and extends the notion of issue publics in various contexts of life politics. The renewed concept of issue publics highlights pluralistic, diverse, lifestyle concerns and value systems, acknowledging variations in personal issue interests. Defining issue publics as those who consider particular issues personally important, the concept of issue publics in life politics emphasizes individuals’ deep commitment to life-choice issues. Encompassing the reflexivity between the selfhood and systems, as well as flexibility between the state and market, citizens and consumers, collective and personal, and public and private domains, contemporary issue publics are conceptualized at the intermediary level.

I argue that the notion of issue publics has become increasingly relevant to contemporary politics, especially due to the new media environment. The development of digital technologies and the adoption of entertainment-oriented media set the ecological conditions for the reconfiguration of political communication through multilevel selectivity: advocacy groups’ (and political elites’) selective targeting on issue interests, selective media choices, and strategic polarization around issue conflicts all together interdependently influence individuals’ selective issue information gathering. Without the “middle men”—that is, institutional-level changes that facilitate the activation of latent issue publics—we cannot fully understand the changing nature of citizenship in life politics. This reconceptualized theoretical framework of issue publics encompasses the dynamics and interactions among multiple levels of political actors in both the political and media spheres. Thus, this theoretical framework would be especially useful in locating the citizenry within certain historical, social, and cultural contexts and thus will facilitate a better understanding of the temporal adaption of the citizenry in the ever-changing environment.

Contemporary issue publics in life politics have important implications for democracy. Coupled with intense feelings, issue publics’ pluralistic interests may only feed on fragmentation, issue conflicts, and polarization. On the other hand, diverse political ideals may apply healthy pressure to traditional institutions, increase the flexibility in organizing personal interests, and ultimately provide more opportunities to exercise the power of life politics. The shifting sands of citizenship continue to pose scholarly questions about democratic ideals.