User Participation in Scandinavia — the ‘Third Citizenship’?

Abstract

In this chapter we will take a closer look at user participation in Scandinavia from a citizenship perspective. Thus, the perspective is that of seeing the user role as constituting a set of rights to participate politically. These rights are, in our view, essentially comparable to the rights constituted by the system of political citizenship. In Marshall’s terms, they might be seen as an essential part of a citizen’s social rights, even though Marshall was more concerned with entitlements than participation in this area (Marshall 1950: 95ff). Proposing this point of departure means that the fundamental question becomes whether these rights in effect extend the rights connected with political citizenship, or whether they undermine or short-circuit traditional representative democracy? In other words, does the current extension of user rights bring us closer to the realization of Marshall’s ‘full citizenship’, and could we therefore talk about the system of these rights as a ‘third citizenship’; something which extends and is complementary to the ‘first’ (political rights), and ‘second’ (workplace democracy) citizenship?