Majority rule is the principle that the group which has the most supporters get to decide the rules that all (including any opposing minority) will be compelled to abide by. An absolute majority
is more than half of the voters involved, more than the aggregate of
all other voters casting ballots (including abstentions), and a simple majority is more than half of the voters excluding abstentions.
Rule by such a majority is thought to be to the benefit of more than
rule by less than half (a mere minority) would be. Majority rule is the
binary decision rule most often used in decision-making bodies,
including many legislatures of democratic nations.
Where no one party wins a majority of the seats in a legislature, the
majority of legislators that wields power is partly composed of members
of other parties in support.
Where only two candidates are competing for a single seat, one or
the other will receive a simple majority of valid votes, unless they
tie. But in situations where more than two are competing for a single
seat, simple plurality is sometimes considered as close as possible to
majority in which case having plurality is enough to be elected, while in some systems such as instant-runoff voting
special efforts are made to ensure that the winner is in fact the
majority choice even where three or more are competing for the same
office. However, that does not always happen.
Where multiple members are elected in a district as may happen under Proportional representation or Plurality block voting,
no candidate may receive a majority of votes cast. Under block voting,
the winners, usually of just one party, often have received only a
minority of the votes cast. Under proportional representation the
combined vote tallies of the successful candidates make up a majority of
valid votes. And as such are thought to represent the will of more
voters than candidates supported by just a minority of the voters.
Alternatives
Plurality
Pie charts plurality (left) and majority (right)
One alternative to majority rule is plurality (First-past-the-post voting
or FPTP). This is often used in elections with more than two
candidates. In this case, the winner is the one with the most votes,
whether or not that constitutes a majority.
Supermajority
Parliamentary rules may prescribe the use of a supermajoritarian rule under certain circumstances, such as the 60% filibuster rule to close debate in the US Senate.
However such requirement means that 41 percent of the members or more
could prevent debate from being closed, an example where the majority
will would be blocked by a minority. Switzerland is an example of consensus democracy where generally supermajority rule is applied. A national unity government is a government with a supermajority.
According to Kenneth May,
majority rule is the only "fair" decision rule. Majority rule does not
let some votes count more than others or privilege an alternative by
requiring fewer votes to pass. Formally, majority rule is the only
binary decision rule that has the following properties:
Fairness: This can be separated into two properties:
Anonymity: the decision rule treats each voter identically. Who
casts a vote makes no difference; the voter's identity need not be
disclosed.
Neutrality: the decision rule treats each alternative equally. This is unlike supermajoritarian rules, which can allow the status quo to prevail even though it received fewer votes.
Decisiveness: the decision rule selects a unique winner.
Monotonicity: If a voter changes a preference, MR never switches the
outcome against that voter. If the outcome the voter now prefers would
have won, it still does so.
Majority rule meets these criteria only if the number of voters is
odd or infinite. If the number of voters is even, ties are possible,
violating neutrality. Some assemblies permit the chair to vote only to
break ties. This substitutes a loss of anonymity for the loss of
neutrality.
Other properties
Voting paradox
In group decision-making voting paradoxes
can form. It is possible that alternatives a, b, and c exist such that a
majority prefers a to b, another majority prefers b to c, and yet
another majority prefers c to a. (For each proposition to have majority,
the measure must involve more than just voter's first preference.)
Because majority rule requires an alternative to have majority support
to pass, majority rule is vulnerable to rejecting the majority's
decision. (The minimum number of alternatives that can form such a cycle
(voting paradox) is 3 if the number of voters is different from 4,
because the Nakamura number
of the majority rule is 3. For supermajority rules the minimum number
is often greater, because the Nakamura number is often greater.) Where
three options such a, b, or c are involved, plurality (First-past-the-post|FPTP) or some majoritarian system is used such as Instant-runoff voting or two-round voting.
Responsiveness
Rae
argued and Taylor proved in 1969 that majority rule maximizes the
likelihood that the issues a voter votes for will pass and that the
issues a voter votes against will fail.
Under majority rule, more voters see their choice reflected in the
election results; only a minority are not reflected in the results.
Utilitarian welfare
Schmitz
and Tröger (2012) consider a collective choice problem with two
alternatives and show that majority rule maximizes utilitarian welfare
among all incentive-compatible, anonymous, and neutral voting rules,
provided that voter's types are independent.
When votersʼ utilities are stochastically correlated, other
dominant-strategy choice rules may perform better than majority rule.
Azrieli and Kim (2014) extend the analysis of independent types to
asymmetric environments and by considering both anonymous and
non-anonymous rules.
Limitations
Arguments for limitations
Minority rights
A
super-majority rule actually empowers the minority, making it stronger
(at least through its veto) than the majority. McGann argued that when
only one of multiple minorities is protected by the super-majority rule
(same as seen in simple plurality elections systems), so the protection
is for the status quo, rather than for the faction that supports it.
Another possible way to prevent tyranny is to elevate certain rights as inalienable. Thereafter, any decision that targets such a right might be majoritarian, but it would not be legitimate, because it would violate the requirement for equal rights.
Constitutional rights cannot by themselves offer protection.
Under some circumstances, the legal rights of one person cannot be
guaranteed without unjustly imposing on someone else. McGann wrote, "one
man's right to property in the antebellum South was another man's
slavery." Amartya Sen noted the liberal paradox, stating that a proliferation of rights may make everyone worse off.
Erroneous priorities
The
erroneous priorities effect (EPE) states that groups that act upon what
they initially consider important almost always misplace their effort.
Such groups have not yet determined which factors are most influential.
Only after identifying those factors can they take effective action. EPE
was articulated by K.M. Dye at the Food and Drug Administration.
This discovery led to the recognition that even with good intentions,
effective action requires a different paradigm for language and voting. EPE is a negative consequence of phenomena such as spreadthink and groupthink.
Effective priorities are dependent on recognizing the influence
patterns of global interdependencies and are defeated by EPE when
priorities simply aggregate individual stakeholder's subjective voting
that does not consider those interdependencies. Dye's work resulted in
the discovery of the 6th law of the science of structured dialogic
design, namely that "Learning occurs in a dialogue as the observers
search for influence relationships among the members of a set of
observations."
Other arguments for limitations
Seeds
For Change argued that majority rule can lead to poor deliberative
practice or even to "an aggressive culture and conflict." Along these lines, majority rule may fail to measure the preferences intensity. The authors of An Anarchist Critique of Democracy
argue that "two voters who are casually interested in doing something"
can defeat one voter who has "dire opposition" to the proposal of the
two. Strict observance of majority rule would allow two voters (a majority) to pass legislation that hurts one voter (the minority).
Voting theorists claimed that cycling leads to debilitating instability. Buchanan and Tullock argue that unanimity is the only decision rule that guarantees economic efficiency.
US jury decisions require the support of at least 10 of 12
jurors, or even unanimous support. This supermajoritarian concept
follows directly from the presumption of innocence on which the US legal system is based. Rousseau
advocated supermajority voting on important decisions when he said,
"The more the deliberations are important and serious, the more the
opinion that carries should approach unanimity."
Arguments against limitations
Minority rights
McGann argued that majority rule helps to protect minority rights,
at least in deliberative settings. The argument is that cycling ensures
that parties that lose to a majority have an interest to remain part of
the group's process, because any decision can easily be overturned by
another majority. Furthermore, suppose a minority wishes to overturn a
decision. In that case, under majority rule it just needs to form a
coalition that has more than half of the officials involved and that
will give it power. Under supermajority rules, a minority needs its own
supermajority to overturn a decision.
To support the view that majority rule protects minority rights
better than supermajority rules, McGann pointed to the cloture rule in
the US Senate, which was used to prevent the extension of civil liberties to racial minorities.
Saunders, while agreeing that majority rule may offer better protection
than supermajority rules, argued that majority rule may nonetheless be
of little help to the least minorities.
Other arguments
Saunders argued that deliberative democracy
flourishes under majority rule and that under majority rule,
participants always have to convince more than half the group, while
under supermajoritarian rules participants might only need to persuade a
minority (to prevent a change).
Where large changes in seats held by a party may arise from only
relatively slight change in votes cast (such as under FPTP), and a
simple majority is all that is required to wield power (most
legislatures in democratic countries), governments may repeatedly fall
into and out of power. This may cause polarization and policy lurch, or
it may encourage compromise, depending on other aspects of political
culture. McGann argued that such cycling encourages participants to
compromise, rather than pass resolutions that have the bare minimum
required to "win" because of the likelihood that they would soon be
reversed.
Within this atmosphere of compromise, a minority faction may
accept proposals that it dislikes in order to build a coalition for a
proposal that it deems of greater moment. In that way, majority rule
differentiates weak and strong preferences. McGann argued that such
situations encourage minorities to participate, because majority rule
does not typically create permanent losers, encouraging systemic
stability. He pointed to governments that use largely unchecked majority
rule, such as is seen under proportional representation in the Netherlands, Austria, and Sweden, as empirical evidence of majority rule's stability.
Though citizenship is often legally conflated with nationality in today's Anglo-Saxon world, international law does not usually use the term citizenship to refer to nationality, these two notions being conceptually different dimensions of collective membership.
Conceptually citizenship and nationality are different dimensions of
state membership. Citizenship is focused on the internal political life
of the state and nationality is the dimension of state membership in international law. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to nationality. As such nationality in international law can be called and understood as citizenship, or more generally as subject or belonging to a sovereign state, and not as ethnicity. This notwithstanding, around 10 million people are stateless.
In the contemporary era, the concept of full citizenship encompasses not only active political rights, but full civil rights and social rights.
Historically, the most significant difference between a national and a
citizen is that the citizen has the right to vote for elected officials,
and the right to be elected.
This distinction between full citizenship and other, lesser
relationships goes back to antiquity. Until the 19th and 20th centuries,
it was typical for only a certain percentage of people who belonged to
the state to be considered as full citizens. In the past, a number of
people were excluded from citizenship on the basis of sex, socioeconomic
class, ethnicity, religion, and other factors. However, they held a
legal relationship with their government akin to the modern concept of
nationality.
Determining factors
A person can be recognized as a citizen on a number of bases.
Nationality. Nationality and citizenship are generally
indissociable, citizenship being in most cases a consequence of
nationality.
Place of residence. In some countries, foreign residents have citizenship rights and can vote.
Citizenship by honorary conferment. This type of citizenship is conferred to an individual as a sign of honour.
Excluded categories. In most countries, minors are not considered as
full citizens. In the past, there have been exclusions on entitlement
to citizenship on grounds such as skin color, ethnicity, sex, land
ownership status, and free status (not being a slave). Most of these exclusions no longer apply in most places. Modern examples include some Gulf countries which rarely grant citizenship to non-Muslims, e.g. Qatar is known for granting citizenship to foreign athletes, but they all have to profess the Islamic
faith in order to receive citizenship. The United States grants
citizenship to those born as a result of reproductive technologies, and
internationally adopted children born after February 27, 1983. Some
exclusions still persist for internationally adopted children born
before February 27, 1983, even though their parents meet citizenship
criteria.
Responsibilities of a citizen
Every
citizen has obligations that are required by law and some
responsibilities that benefit the community. Obeying the laws of a
country and paying taxes are some of the obligations required of
citizens by law. Voting and community services form part of
responsibilities of a citizen that benefits the community.
The Constitution of Ghana
(1992), Article 41, obligates citizens to promote the prestige and good
name of Ghana and respect the symbols of Ghana. Examples of national
symbols includes the Ghanaian flag, coat of arms, money, and state
sword. These national symbols must be treated with respect and high
esteem by citizens since they best represent Ghanaians.
Apart from responsibilities, citizens also have rights. Some of
the rights are the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness, the
right to worship, right to run for elected office and right to express
oneself.
Many thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben in his work extending the biopolitical framework of Foucault's History of Sexuality in the book, Homo Sacer, point to the concept of citizenship beginning in the early city-states of ancient Greece,
although others see it as primarily a modern phenomenon dating back
only a few hundred years and, for humanity, that the concept of
citizenship arose with the first laws. Polis meant both the political assembly of the city-state as well as the entire society. Citizenship concept has generally been identified as a western phenomenon.
There is a general view that citizenship in ancient times was a simpler
relation than modern forms of citizenship, although this view has come
under scrutiny.
The relation of citizenship has not been a fixed or static relation but
constantly changed within each society, and that according to one view,
citizenship might "really have worked" only at select periods during
certain times, such as when the Athenian politician Solon made reforms in the early Athenian state.
Citizenship was also contingent on a variety of biopolitical
assemblages, such as the bioethics of emerging Theo-Philosophical
traditions. It was necessary to fit Aristotle's definition of the
besouled (the animate) to obtain citizenship: neither the sacred olive
tree nor spring would have any rights.
An essential part of the framework of Greco-Roman ethics is the figure of Homo Sacer or the bare life.
Historian Geoffrey Hosking in his 2005 Modern Scholar lecture course suggested that citizenship in ancient Greece arose from an appreciation for the importance of freedom. Hosking explained:
It can be argued that this growth
of slavery was what made Greeks particularly conscious of the value of
freedom. After all, any Greek farmer might fall into debt and therefore
might become a slave, at almost any time ... When the Greeks fought
together, they fought in order to avoid being enslaved by warfare, to
avoid being defeated by those who might take them into slavery. And they
also arranged their political institutions so as to remain free men.
— Geoffrey Hosking, 2005
Geoffrey
Hosking suggests that fear of being enslaved was a central motivating
force for the development of the Greek sense of citizenship. Sculpture: a
Greek woman being served by a slave-child.
Slavery permitted slave-owners to have substantial free time and enabled participation in public life.[20] Polis citizenship was marked by exclusivity. Inequality of status was widespread; citizens (πολίτης politēs < πόλις 'city') had a higher status than non-citizens, such as women, slaves, and resident foreigners (metics). The first form of citizenship was based on the way people lived in the ancient Greek
times, in small-scale organic communities of the polis. The obligations
of citizenship were deeply connected to one's everyday life in the
polis. These small-scale organic communities were generally seen as a
new development in world history, in contrast to the established ancient
civilizations of Egypt
or Persia, or the hunter-gatherer bands elsewhere. From the viewpoint
of the ancient Greeks, a person's public life could not be separated
from their private life, and Greeks did not distinguish between the two
worlds according to the modern western conception. The obligations of
citizenship were deeply connected with everyday life. To be truly human,
one had to be an active citizen to the community, which Aristotle
famously expressed: "To take no part in the running of the community's
affairs is to be either a beast or a god!" This form of citizenship was
based on the obligations of citizens towards the community, rather than
rights given to the citizens of the community. This was not a problem
because they all had a strong affinity with the polis; their own destiny
and the destiny of the community were strongly linked. Also, citizens
of the polis saw obligations to the community as an opportunity to be
virtuous, it was a source of honor and respect. In Athens, citizens were
both rulers and ruled, important political and judicial offices were
rotated and all citizens had the right to speak and vote in the
political assembly.
Roman ideas
In the Roman Empire,
citizenship expanded from small-scale communities to the entirety of
the empire. Romans realized that granting citizenship to people from all
over the empire legitimized Roman rule over conquered areas. Roman
citizenship was no longer a status of political agency, as it had been
reduced to a judicial safeguard and the expression of rule and law. Rome carried forth Greek ideas of citizenship such as the principles of equality under the law, civic participation in government, and notions that "no one citizen should have too much power for too long", but Rome offered relatively generous terms to its captives, including chances for lesser forms of citizenship. If Greek citizenship was an "emancipation from the world of things",
the Roman sense increasingly reflected the fact that citizens could act
upon material things as well as other citizens, in the sense of buying
or selling property, possessions, titles, goods. One historian
explained:
The person was defined and
represented through his actions upon things; in the course of time, the
term property came to mean, first, the defining characteristic of a
human or other being; second, the relation which a person had with a
thing; and third, the thing defined as the possession of some person.
Roman citizenship reflected a struggle between the upper-class patrician interests against the lower-order working groups known as the plebeian class.
A citizen came to be understood as a person "free to act by law, free
to ask and expect the law's protection, a citizen of such and such a
legal community, of such and such a legal standing in that community".
Citizenship meant having rights to have possessions, immunities,
expectations, which were "available in many kinds and degrees, available
or unavailable to many kinds of person for many kinds of reason". The law itself was a kind of bond uniting people. Roman citizenship was more impersonal, universal, multiform, having different degrees and applications.
Middle Ages
During the European Middle Ages, citizenship was usually associated with cities and towns (see medieval commune), and applied mainly to middle-class folk. Titles such as burgher, grand burgher (German Großbürger) and the bourgeoisie
denoted political affiliation and identity in relation to a particular
locality, as well as membership in a mercantile or trading class; thus,
individuals of respectable means and socioeconomic status were
interchangeable with citizens.
During this era, members of the nobility had a range of privileges above commoners (see aristocracy), though political upheavals and reforms, beginning most prominently with the French Revolution, abolished privileges and created an egalitarian concept of citizenship.
Renaissance
During the Renaissance, people transitioned from being subjects of a king or queen to being citizens of a city and later to a nation. Each city had its own law, courts, and independent administration.
And being a citizen often meant being subject to the city's law in
addition to having power in some instances to help choose officials.
City dwellers who had fought alongside nobles in battles to defend
their cities were no longer content with having a subordinate social
status but demanded a greater role in the form of citizenship. Membership in guilds was an indirect form of citizenship in that it helped their members succeed financially. The rise of citizenship was linked to the rise of republicanism, according to one account, since independent citizens meant that kings had less power. Citizenship became an idealized, almost abstract, concept,
and did not signify a submissive relation with a lord or count, but
rather indicated the bond between a person and the state in the rather
abstract sense of having rights and duties.
Modern times
The
modern idea of citizenship still respects the idea of political
participation, but it is usually done through "elaborate systems of
political representation at a distance" such as representative democracy.
Modern citizenship is much more passive; action is delegated to others;
citizenship is often a constraint on acting, not an impetus to act.
Nevertheless, citizens are usually aware of their obligations to
authorities and are aware that these bonds often limit what they can do.
Portrait of Dred Scott, the plaintiff in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford
case at the Supreme Court of the United States, commissioned by a
"group of Negro citizens" and presented to the Missouri Historical
Society, St. Louis, in 1888
From 1790 until the mid-twentieth century, United States law used racial criteria to establish citizenship rights and regulate who was eligible to become a naturalized citizen. The Naturalization Act of 1790,
the first law in U.S. history to establish rules for citizenship and
naturalization, barred citizenship to all people who were not of
European descent, stating that "any alien being a free white person, who
shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, maybe admitted to becoming a citizen thereof."
Under early U.S. laws, African Americans were not eligible for citizenship. In 1857, these laws were upheld in the US Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford,
which ruled that "a free negro of the African race, whose ancestors
were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a 'citizen'
within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States," and that
"the special rights and immunities guaranteed to citizens do not apply
to them."
It was not until the abolition of slavery following the American Civil War that African Americans were granted citizenship rights. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,
ratified on July 9, 1868, stated that "all persons born or naturalized
in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are
citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Two years later, the Naturalization Act of 1870
would extend the right to become a naturalized citizen to include
"aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent".
Despite the gains made by African Americans after the Civil War, Native Americans, Asians, and others not considered "free white persons" were still denied the ability to become citizens. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
explicitly denied naturalization rights to all people of Chinese
origin, while subsequent acts passed by the US Congress, such as laws in
1906, 1917, and 1924, would include clauses that denied immigration and naturalization rights to people based on broadly defined racial categories. Supreme Court cases such as Ozawa v. the United States (1922) and U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind
(1923), would later clarify the meaning of the phrase "free white
persons," ruling that ethnically Japanese, Indian, and other
non-European people were not "white persons", and were therefore
ineligible for naturalization under U.S. law.
Native Americans were not granted full US citizenship until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act
in 1924. However, even well into the 1960s, some state laws prevented
Native Americans from exercising their full rights as citizens, such as
the right to vote. In 1962, New Mexico became the last state to enfranchise Native Americans.
It was not until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952
that the racial and gender restrictions for naturalization were
explicitly abolished. However, the act still contained restrictions
regarding who was eligible for US citizenship and retained a national
quota system which limited the number of visas given to immigrants based
on their national origin, to be fixed "at a rate of one-sixth of one
percent of each nationality's population in the United States in 1920". It was not until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that these immigration quota systems were drastically altered in favor of a less discriminatory system.
The 1918 constitution of revolutionary Russia granted citizenship to any foreigners who were living within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, so long as they were "engaged in work and [belonged] to the working class."
It recognized "the equal rights of all citizens, irrespective of their
racial or national connections" and declared oppression of any minority
group or race "to be contrary to the fundamental laws of the Republic."
The 1918 constitution also established the right to vote and be elected
to soviets
for both men and women "irrespective of religion, nationality,
domicile, etc. [...] who shall have completed their eighteenth year by
the day of the election." The later constitutions of the USSR would grant universal Soviet citizenship to the citizens of all member republicsin concord with the principles of non-discrimination laid out in the original 1918 constitution of Russia.
Nazi Germany
Nazism,
the German variant of twentieth-century fascism, classified inhabitants
of the country into three main hierarchical categories, each of which
would have different rights in relation to the state: citizens,
subjects, and aliens. The first category, citizens, were to possess full
civic rights and responsibilities. Citizenship was conferred only on
males of German (or so-called "Aryan") heritage who had completed military service, and could be revoked at any time by the state. The Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 established racial criteria for citizenship in the German Reich, and because of this law Jews and others who could not "prove German racial heritage" were stripped of their citizenship.
The second category, subjects, referred to all others who were
born within the nation's boundaries who did not fit the racial criteria
for citizenship. Subjects would have no voting rights, could not hold
any position within the state, and possessed none of the other rights
and civic responsibilities conferred on citizens. All women were to be
conferred "subject" status upon birth, and could only obtain "citizen"
status if they worked independently or if they married a German citizen
(see women in Nazi Germany).
The final category, aliens, referred to those who were citizens of another state, who also had no rights.
In 2021, the German government passed Article 116 (2) of the Basic Law, which entitles the restoration of citizenship to individuals who had their German citizenship
revoked "on political, racial, or religious grounds" between 30 January
1933 and 8 May 1945. This also entitles their descendants to German
citizenship.
The primary principles of Israeli citizenship is jus sanguinis (citizenship by descent) for Jews and jus soli (citizenship by place of birth) for others.
Different senses
Many
theorists suggest that there are two opposing conceptions of
citizenship: an economic one, and a political one. For further
information, see History of citizenship. Citizenship status, under social contract theory, carries with it both rights and duties.
In this sense, citizenship was described as "a bundle of rights --
primarily, political participation in the life of the community, the
right to vote, and the right to receive certain protection from the
community, as well as obligations."
Citizenship is seen by most scholars as culture-specific, in the sense
that the meaning of the term varies considerably from culture to
culture, and over time. In China, for example, there is a cultural politics of citizenship which could be called "peopleship", argued by an academic article.
How citizenship is understood depends on the person making the
determination. The relation of citizenship has never been fixed or
static, but constantly changes within each society. While citizenship
has varied considerably throughout history, and within societies over
time, there are some common elements but they vary considerably as well.
As a bond, citizenship extends beyond basic kinship ties to unite
people of different genetic backgrounds. It usually signifies membership
in a political body. It is often based on or was a result of, some form
of military service or expectation of future service. It usually
involves some form of political participation, but this can vary from
token acts to active service in government.
Citizenship is a status in society. It is an ideal state as well.
It generally describes a person with legal rights within a given
political order. It almost always has an element of exclusion, meaning
that some people are not citizens and that this distinction can
sometimes be very important, or not important, depending on a particular
society. Citizenship as a concept is generally hard to isolate
intellectually and compare with related political notions since it
relates to many other aspects of society such as the family, military service, the individual, freedom, religion, ideas of right, and wrong, ethnicity, and patterns for how a person should behave in society.
When there are many different groups within a nation, citizenship may
be the only real bond that unites everybody as equals without
discrimination—it is a "broad bond" linking "a person with the state"
and gives people a universal identity as a legal member of a specific
nation.
Modern citizenship has often been looked at as two competing underlying ideas:
The liberal-individualist or sometimes liberal conception of
citizenship suggests that citizens should have entitlements necessary
for human dignity. It assumes people act for the purpose of enlightened self-interest.
According to this viewpoint, citizens are sovereign, morally autonomous
beings with duties to pay taxes, obey the law, engage in business
transactions, and defend the nation if it comes under attack, but are essentially passive politically,
and their primary focus is on economic betterment. This idea began to
appear around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and became
stronger over time, according to one view.
According to this formulation, the state exists for the benefit of
citizens and has an obligation to respect and protect the rights of
citizens, including civil rights and political rights. It was later that so-called social rights became part of the obligation for the state.
The civic-republican or sometimes classical or civic humanist
conception of citizenship emphasizes man's political nature and sees
citizenship as an active process, not a passive state or legal marker. It is relatively more concerned that government will interfere with popular places to practice citizenship in the public sphere. Citizenship means being active in government affairs.
According to one view, most people today live as citizens according to
the liberal-individualist conception but wished they lived more
according to the civic-republican ideal. An ideal citizen is one who exhibits "good civic behavior". Free citizens and a republic government are "mutually interrelated." Citizenship suggested a commitment to "duty and civic virtue".
Responsibility is an action that individuals of a state or country must take note of in the interest of a common good. These responsibilities can be categorised into personal and civic responsibilities.
Scholars suggest that the concept of citizenship contains many
unresolved issues, sometimes called tensions, existing within the
relation, that continue to reflect uncertainty about what citizenship is
supposed to mean. Some unresolved issues regarding citizenship include questions about what is the proper balance between duties and rights. Another is a question about what is the proper balance between political citizenship versus social citizenship.
Some thinkers see benefits with people being absent from public
affairs, since too much participation such as revolution can be
destructive, yet too little participation such as total apathy can be
problematic as well.
Citizenship can be seen as a special elite status, and it can also be
seen as a democratizing force and something that everybody has; the
concept can include both senses. According to sociologistArthur Stinchcombe,
citizenship is based on the extent that a person can control one's own
destiny within the group in the sense of being able to influence the
government of the group.
One last distinction within citizenship is the so-called consent
descent distinction, and this issue addresses whether citizenship is a
fundamental matter determined by a person choosing to belong to a
particular nation––by their consent––or is citizenship a matter of where
a person was born––that is, by their descent.
Some intergovernmental organizations have extended the concept and terminology associated with citizenship to the international level,
where it is applied to the totality of the citizens of their
constituent countries combined. Citizenship at this level is a secondary
concept, with rights deriving from national citizenship.
Citizenship
of the Union is hereby established. Every person holding the
nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union.
Citizenship of the Union shall be additional to and not replace national
citizenship.
An agreement is known as the amended EC Treaty
established certain minimal rights for European Union citizens. Article
12 of the amended EC Treaty guaranteed a general right of
non-discrimination within the scope of the Treaty. Article 18 provided a
limited right to free movement and residence in the Member States other
than that of which the European Union citizen is a national. Articles
18-21 and 225 provide certain political rights.
Citizenship of the Mercosur is granted to eligible citizens of the Southern Common Market member states.
It was approved in 2010 through the Citizenship Statute and should be
fully implemented by the member countries in 2021 when the program will
be transformed in an international treaty incorporated into the national
legal system of the countries, under the concept of "Mercosur Citizen".
Citizenship ceremony on beach near Cooktown, Queensland. 2012
The concept of "Commonwealth Citizenship" has been in place ever since the establishment of the Commonwealth of Nations.
As with the EU, one holds Commonwealth citizenship only by being a
citizen of a Commonwealth member state. This form of citizenship offers
certain privileges within some Commonwealth countries:
Some such countries do not require tourist visas
of citizens of other Commonwealth countries or allow some Commonwealth
citizens to stay in the country for tourism purposes without a visa for
longer than citizens of other countries.
In some Commonwealth countries, resident citizens of other Commonwealth countries are entitled to political rights, e.g., the right to vote in local and national elections and in some cases even the right to stand for election.
In some instances the right to work in any position (including the civil service) is granted, except for certain specific positions, such as in the defense departments, Governor-General or President or Prime Minister.
In the United Kingdom, all Commonwealth citizens legally residing in the country can vote and stand for office at all elections.
Although Ireland
was excluded from the Commonwealth in 1949 because it declared itself a
republic, Ireland is generally treated as if it were still a member.
Legislation often specifically provides for equal treatment between
Commonwealth countries and Ireland and refers to "Commonwealth countries
and Ireland". Ireland's citizens are not classified as foreign nationals in the United Kingdom.
Diagram of relationship between; Citizens, Politicians + Laws
Citizenship most usually relates to membership of the nation-state, but the term can also apply at the subnational level. Subnational entities may impose requirements, of residency
or otherwise, which permit citizens to participate in the political
life of that entity or to enjoy benefits provided by the government of
that entity. But in such cases, those eligible are also sometimes seen
as "citizens" of the relevant state, province, or region. An example of
this is how the fundamental basis of Swiss citizenship is a citizenship of an individual commune, from which follows citizenship of a canton and of the Confederation. Another example is Åland where the residents enjoy special provincial citizenship within Finland, hembygdsrätt.
The United States has a federal system in which a person is a citizen of their specific state of residence, such as New York or California, as well as a citizen of the United States. State constitutions may grant certain rights above and beyond what is granted under the United States Constitution
and may impose their own obligations including the sovereign right of
taxation and military service; each state maintains at least one
military force subject to national militia transfer service, the state's
national guard, and some states maintain a second military force not
subject to nationalization.
"Active citizenship"
is the philosophy that citizens should work towards the betterment of
their community through economic participation, public, volunteer work,
and other such efforts to improve life for all citizens. In this vein,
citizenship education is taught in schools, as an academic subject in
some countries. By the time children reach secondary education there is
an emphasis on such unconventional subjects to be included in an
academic curriculum. While the diagram on citizenship to the right is
rather facile and depthless, it is simplified to explain the general
model of citizenship that is taught to many secondary school pupils. The
idea behind this model within education is to instill in young pupils
that their actions (i.e. their vote) affect collective citizenship and thus in turn them.
Republic of Ireland
It is taught in the Republic of Ireland
as an exam subject for the Junior Certificate. It is known as Civic,
Social and Political Education (CSPE). A new Leaving Certificate exam
subject with the working title 'Politics & Society' is being
developed by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) and is expected to be introduced to the curriculum sometime after 2012.
United Kingdom
Citizenship is offered as a General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) course in many schools in the United Kingdom. As well as teaching knowledge about democracy, parliament, government, the justice system, human rights
and the UK's relations with the wider world, students participate in
active citizenship, often involving a social action or social enterprise
in their local community.
Citizenship is a compulsory subject of the National Curriculum in state schools in England for all pupils aged 11–16. Some schools offer a qualification in this subject at GCSE and A level.
All state schools have a statutory requirement to teach the subject,
assess pupil attainment and report student's progress in citizenship to
parents.
Citizenship is not taught as a discrete subject in Scottish
schools, but is a cross-curricular strand of the Curriculum for
Excellence. However they do teach a subject called "Modern Studies"
which covers the social, political and economic study of local, national
and international issues.
Citizenship is taught as a standalone subject in all state schools in Northern Ireland and most other schools in some forms from year 8 to 10 prior to GCSEs. Components of Citizenship are then also incorporated into GCSE courses such as 'Learning for Life and Work'.
Criticism
The concept of citizenship is criticized by open borders advocates, who argue that it functions as a caste, feudal, or apartheid
system in which people are assigned dramatically different
opportunities based on the accident of birth. It is also criticized by
some libertarians, especially anarcho-capitalists. In 1987, moral philosopher Joseph Carens
argued that "citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern
equivalent of feudal privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances
one's life chances. Like feudal birthright privileges, restrictive
citizenship is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely".
Knowledge-based engineering (KBE) is the application of knowledge-based systems
technology to the domain of manufacturing design and production. The
design process is inherently a knowledge-intensive activity, so a great
deal of the emphasis for KBE is on the use of knowledge-based technology
to support computer-aided design (CAD) however knowledge-based techniques (e.g. knowledge management) can be applied to the entire product lifecycle.
The CAD domain has always been an early adopter of software-engineering techniques used in knowledge-based systems, such as object-orientation and rules. Knowledge-based engineering integrates these technologies with CAD and other traditional engineering software tools.
Benefits of KBE include improved collaboration of the design team
due to knowledge management, improved re-use of design artifacts, and
automation of major parts of the product lifecycle.
Overview
KBE is essentially engineering on the basis of knowledge models. A knowledge model uses knowledge representation
to represent the artifacts of the design process (as well as the
process itself) rather than or in addition to conventional programming
and database techniques.
The advantages to using knowledge representation to model industrial engineering tasks and artifacts are:
Improved integration. In traditional CAD and industrial systems
each application often has its own slightly different model. Having a
standardized knowledge model makes integration easier across different
systems and applications.
More re-use. A knowledge model facilitates storing and tagging
design artifacts so that they can easily be found again and re-used.
Also, knowledge models are themselves more re-usable by virtue of using
formalism such as IS-A relations
(classes and subclasses in the object-oriented paradigm). With
subclassing it can be very easy to create new types of artifacts and
processes by starting with an existing class and adding a new subclass
that inherits all the default properties and behaviors of its parents
and then can be adapted as needed.
Better maintenance. Class hierarchies not only facilitate re-use
they also facilitate maintenance of systems. By having one definition of
a class that is shared by multiple systems, issues of change control
and consistency are greatly simplified.
More automation. Expert system rules can capture and automate
decision making that is left to human experts with most conventional
systems.
There are two primary ways that KBE can be implemented:
Build knowledge models from the ground up using knowledge-based technology
Layer knowledge-based technology on top of existing CAD, simulation, and other engineering applications
An early example of the first approach was the Simkit tool developed by Intellicorp in the 1980s. Simkit was developed on top of Intellicorp's Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE). KEE was a very powerful knowledge-based systems development environment. KEE started on Lisp and added frames, objects, and rules,
as well as powerful additional tools, such as hypothetical reasoning
and truth maintenance. Simkit added stochastic simulation capabilities
to the KEE environment. These capabilities included an event model,
random distribution generators, simulation visualization, and more. The
Simkit tool was an early example of KBE. It could define a simulation in
terms of class models and rules and then run the simulation as a
conventional simulation would. Along the way, the simulation could
continue to invoke rules, demons, and object methods, providing the
potential for much richer simulation as well as analysis than
conventional simulation tools.
One of the issues that Simkit faced was a common issue for most
early KBE systems developed with this method: The Lisp knowledge-based
environments provide very powerful knowledge representation and reasoning
capabilities; however, they did so at the cost of massive requirements
for memory and processing that stretched the limits of the computers of
the time. Simkit could run simulations with thousands of objects and do
very sophisticated analysis on those objects. However, industrial
simulations often required tens or hundreds of thousands of objects, and
Simkit had difficulty scaling up to such levels.
The second alternative to developing KBE is illustrated by the CATIA
product suite. CATIA started with products for CAD and other
traditional industrial engineering applications and added
knowledge-based capabilities on to them; for example, their
KnowledgeWare module.
History
KBE
developed in the 1980s. It was part of the initial wave of investment in
Artificial Intelligence for business that fueled expert systems. Like
expert systems, it relied on what at the time were leading edge advances
in corporate information technology such as PCs, workstations, and client-server architectures. These same technologies were also facilitating the growth of CAx and CAD software. CAD tended to drive leading edge technologies and even push them past their current limits.[5] The best example of this was object-oriented programming and database technology, which were adapted by CAD when most corporate information technology shops were dominated by relational databases and procedural programming.
As with expert systems, KBE suffered a downturn during the AI Winter.
Also, as with expert systems and artificial intelligence technology in
general, there was renewed interest with the Internet. In the case of
KBE, the interest was perhaps strongest in the business-to-business type of electronic commerce and technologies that facilitate the definition of industry standard vocabularies and ontologies for manufactured products.
The semantic web is the vision of Tim Berners Lee for the next generation of the Internet. This will be a knowledge-based Internet built on ontologies, objects, and frame technologies that were also enabling technologies for KBE. Important technologies for the semantic web are XML, RDF, and OWL. The semantic web has excellent potential for KBE, and KBE ontologies and projects are a strong area for current research.
KBE and product lifecycle management
Product Lifecycle Management
(PLM) is the management of the manufacturing process of any industry
that produces goods. It can span the full product lifecycle from idea
generation to implementation, delivery, and disposal. KBE at this level
will deal with product issues of a more generic nature than it will with
CAx.
A natural area of emphasis is on the production process; however,
lifecycle management can cover many more issues such as business
planning, marketing, etc. An advantage of using KBE is getting the
automated reasoning and knowledge management services of a
knowledge-based environment integrated with the many diverse but related
needs of lifecycle management. KBE supports the decision processes
involved with configuration, trades, control, management, and a number
of other areas, such as optimization.
KBE and CAx
CAx
refers to the domain of computer-aided tools for analysis and design.
CAx spans multiple domains. Examples are computer-aided design of
manufactured parts, software, the architecture of buildings, etc.
Although each specific domain of CAx will have very different kinds of
problems and artifacts, they all share common issues as well such as
having to manage collaboration of sophisticated knowledge workers,
design and re-use of complex artifacts, etc.
An example can be taken from Boeing's experience. The 777 Program
took on the challenge of having a digitally-defined plane. That
required an investment in large-scale systems, databases, and
workstations for design and analytical engineering work. Given the
magnitude of the computing work that was required, KBE got its toe in
the door, so to speak, through a "pay as you go plan." Essentially, this
technique was to show benefits and then to obtain more work (think
agile engineering) thereby. In the case of the 777, the project got to
where influences to changes in the early part of the design/build stream
(loads) could be recomputed over a weekend to allow evaluation by
downstream processes. As required, engineers were in the loop to finish
and sign off on work. At the same time, CAx allowed tighter tolerances
to be met. With the 777, KBE was so successful that subsequent programs
applied it in more areas. Over time, KBE facilities were integrated into
the CAx platform and are a normal part of the operation.
KBE and knowledge management
One of the most important knowledge-based technologies for KBE is knowledge management.
Knowledge management tools support a wide spectrum repository, i.e., a
repository that can support all different types of work artifacts:
informal drawings and notes, large database tables, multimedia and
hypertext objects, etc. Knowledge management provides the various group
support tools to help diverse stake holders collaborate on the design
and implementation of products. It also provides tools to automate the
design process (e.g., rules) and to facilitate re-use.
KBE methodology
The
development of KBE applications concerns the requirements to identify,
capture, structure, formalize, and finally implement knowledge. Many
different so-called KBE platforms support only the implementation step,
which is not always the main bottleneck in the KBE development process.
In order to limit the risk associated with the development and
maintenance of KBE application, there is a need to rely on an
appropriate methodology for managing the knowledge and maintaining it up
to date.
As example of such KBE methodology, the EU project MOKA, "Methodology
and tools Oriented to Knowledge based Applications," proposes solutions
which focus on the structuring and formalization steps as well as links
to the implementation.
An alternative to MOKA is to use general knowledge engineering
methods that have been developed for expert systems across all
industries or to use general software development methodologies such as the Rational Unified Process or Agile methods.
Languages for KBE
Two critical issues for the languages and formalisms used for KBE are:
Knowledge-based vs. procedural programming
Standardization vs. proprietary
Knowledge-based vs. procedural programming
A
fundamental trade-off identified with knowledge representation in
artificial intelligence is between expressive power and computability.
As Levesque demonstrated in his classic paper on the topic, the more
powerful a knowledge-representation formalism one designs, the closer
the formalism will come to the expressive power of first order logic. As
Levesque also demonstrated, the closer a language is to First Order
Logic, the more probable that it will allow expressions that are
undecidable or require exponential processing power to complete.
In the implementation of KBE systems, this trade off is reflected in
the choice to use powerful knowledge-based environments or more
conventional procedural and object-oriented programming environments.
Standardization vs. proprietary
There
is a trade off between using standards such as STEM and vendor- or
business-specific proprietary languages. Standardization facilitates knowledge sharing,
integration, and re-use. Proprietary formats (such as CATIA) can
provide competitive advantage and powerful features beyond current
standardization.
Genworks GDL, a commercial product whose core is based on the AGPL-licensed Gendl Project,
addresses the issue of application longevity by providing a high-level
declarative language kernel which is a superset of a standard dialect of
the Lisp programming language (ANSI Common Lisp, or CL). Gendl/GDL itself is proposed as a de facto standard for ANSI CL-based KBE languages.
In 2006, the Object Management Group released a KBE services RFP document and requested feedback. To date, no OMG specification for KBE exists; however, there is an OMG standard for CAD services.
An example of a system-independent language for the development of machine-readable ontologies that is in the KBE domain is Gellish English.
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