1. The obligations of democratic citizenship

Democratic citizenship is an achievement. Modern citizenship offers the most powerful way we have of integrating the demands of justice with membership in a community. Most crucially, it links a commitment to free and equal individuals – who have differing ways of life, religions, and identities but the same fundamental status as members – with the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation. It thereby sharply breaks – at least in its aspirations and assumptions – with older ways of organizing societies, on the basis of social caste, privilege, dictatorship, or minority rule.

This achievement is under a great deal of stress right now. Public confidence in democracy is at the lowest point on record in the United States, the major democracies of Western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. In some countries, including the United States, this metric has now reached an important threshold: the number of people who are dissatisfied with democracy is greater than the number of people who are satisfied with it. A report from the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Future of Democracy found that the decline was especially pronounced in countries which were supposed to be democratically stable: high income democracies in Europe and North America (Foa et al., Reference Foa, Klassen, Slade, Rand and Collins2020). It may (or may not) be an exaggeration to claim, as many have done, that there is a ‘crisis of democracy’ but it is certainly true that the rise of populist movements, extremists, political polarization, and rising inequality indicates a serious problem.

This paper explores one response to this democratic challenge, that of mandatory national service. To set the stage, I begin by briefly recapping the history of democratic citizenship. This history reveals that the architecture weaving citizenship into the lives of society's members has become thin and fragile.

The British sociologist TH Marshall in his classic work Citizenship and Social Class (Reference Marshall1964) describes the path to modern citizenship in terms of three stages, each stage correlated with an expansion of rights: from the 17^th-mid 18th century, we see consolidation of the civil rights needed to engage in a range of social activities, including the rights to religious freedom and to engage in trade and to own property; from the late 18^th to early 20th, citizenship evolved to include political rights such as the right to vote and to stand for an election; finally post-world war II democracies featured the creation of social and economic rights to give citizens a right ‘to share in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society’. Modern democratic citizenship is meant to include all three sets of rights: civil rights, political rights, and economic rights. Where any of these rights are violated or ascribed unequally, some people are excluded from full membership in society. Marshall was particularly concerned to integrate the working classes whose lack of education and economic resources had excluded them from the ‘common culture’ which should have been a ‘common possession and heritage’ (Reference Marshall1964, pp. 78, 101-102).

The arc of creating these new rights owes much to generations of activists, labor unions, and social movements. (Of course, these rights are imperfectly realized in today's societies.) As the rights of citizenship expanded, it might be expected that the obligations associated with citizenship also expanded. That is because rights are correlated with obligations: it makes little sense to say that I have a right to something if there is no duty on anyone to provide for and enforce that right. Rights without corresponding obligations, while not nothing, run the risk of being ‘mere words’. (This is sometimes a charge levelled at human rights.) Marshall himself saw this reciprocal relationship between rights and responsibilities, writing, ‘If citizenship is invoked in the defense of rights, the corresponding duties of citizenship cannot be ignored’ (Reference Marshall1964, p. 123).

Yet the duties of citizenship have steadily eroded over time even as citizen's rights have grown; today, for the most part, our obligations as citizens are understood as aspirations and not requirements.Footnote ¹ For example, it is often said that a good citizen is someone who votes, pays their taxes, obeys the laws and otherwise participates in collective self-government. But a sizeable proportion of citizens in democracies never or rarely vote and play little role in collective decision-making at any level.

What about the obligation to pay taxes? Taxation, like obeying the law, is not so much a feature of citizenship but of residency. For example, in the United States, all persons physically living and working within its boundaries are required to pay taxes and obey the law. (There is one exception where citizenship makes a difference to that obligation: citizens working outside the US are required to pay US taxes, while non-citizens are not – but the US is the only country in the world except for Eritrea that taxes permanent expatriates and this practice remains quite controversial.)

For much of American history, serving in the military was seen as a core obligation of citizenship (although initially only for men.) In 1973 that changed when the draft was abolished and an all-volunteer force was established. Britain abolished its own system of conscription after some fits and starts, in 1960. Many well-known factors led to ending the draft in the US, including an unpopular war in Vietnam. Far less well known is the fact that the libertarian economist Milton Friedman played a significant role in the ending of military conscription.Footnote ² Friedman and his followers successfully argued to President Richard Nixon that the draft was the equivalent of indentured servitude; Friedman denied – adamantly – that such service was an obligation stemming from membership and his argument carried the day. The result is that in the US – and in most developed country democracies – military service has become voluntary, yielding a smaller and more focused group of enlistees, enticed at least in part by market considerations. Fewer than 1% of the US population today serves in the military.

In fact, the only obligation that American citizens currently have as citizens is the obligation to serve on a jury. Political Scientist Robert Putnam recently has noted that the ratio of the use of the term ‘responsibility’ in American publications has declined with respect to the use of the term ‘rights’ over the last fifty years (Reference Putnam and Garrett2020, p. 193). Considerations of what we owe to each other have taken a back seat to how much we can each get for ourselves. The upshot is that, in the twenty-first century, the obligations of citizenship have become, for the most part, an empty set. My aim in this paper is to argue that the fact that this set is empty poses a serious problem for democracy, especially in an age of growing population heterogeneity and inequality; to propose a policy to address that problem – mandatory public service for all citizens; and to anticipate and respond to some (but not all) important objections.

2. Citizenship: Not by Laws Alone

The problem with the empty set of obligations is that citizenship cannot be maintained by laws and incentives alone. The existence, health and stability of democratic citizenship depends in some way on the quality and attitudes of a society's members. This dependence arises because norms and dispositions shape what use people can make of their rights and opportunities. Democracy cannot flourish if some are indifferent to the rights and opportunities of their fellows; if they see politics as simply a vehicle to advance their own private interests; if a society's members do not trust one another; or are hostile to other's claims of equal standing. Democracy cannot flourish if individuals and groups do not approach disagreement in the spirit of a willingness to attempt to justify their own views to each other, and to be prepared to listen and engage with the views of others. Democracy cannot flourish where might makes right.

While it is has sometimes been thought that good incentives (including the threat of punishment) can make self-interested individuals into good citizens – in the words of the 17^th century philosopher Bernard Mandeville, ‘private vices, public benefits’ – we now know that in many cases, self-interested motivations are not sufficient to produce publicly oriented behaviors, even in the face of strong incentives. Market incentives, undersupply civic values and, in some cases, undermine them.

Consider the following example. In Haifa, six day care centers imposed a fine on parents who were late in picking up their children at the end of the day. Parents surprised the day cares in how they responded to the fine – they doubled the amount of time that they were late! Even, when, after 12 weeks, the fines were revoked, the parent's enhanced tardiness persisted. Putting a price on lateness likely undermined the parent's sense of an ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers; instead they now treated the extra time as a commodity to be bought (Gneezy, Reference Gneezy and Rustichini2000). This finding, that market incentives can crowd out pro-social attitudes – such as concern for others – has been repeated in a great many studies. (Indeed, there are replicated studies that show that merely studying economics decreases student's ability to solve collective action problems.) I have little doubt that if the fine had been sufficiently high – one thousand dollars a minute – the parents would have responded differently. But it's not always easy to find the right prices, and furthermore, it is not a good idea to put a price on everything (Satz, Reference Satz2010).

What about legal incentives like the threat of punishment for breaking the law – can't that generate the pro-social behaviors needed for democratic citizenship? Not alone. One problem is that pro-social motivation won't be well sustained in cases where many people are flouting the rules and getting away with it: no one wants to be a sucker. Another problem is that it's often costly to ascertain whether citizens are following the rules or not – and as society becomes more complex the costs go up, making the monitoring of compliance difficult. So trust becomes especially important. A final and perhaps key problem is that it is especially hard to sustain pro-social motivation in a society that is cleaved along racial, ethnic or class lines, where people's unequal circumstances and limited knowledge about one another undermine the existence of a democratic ‘we’. Under such circumstances it's too easy to see another's fate as outside my responsibility. Even if I comply with the letter of the law, that doesn't mean I will stand up for your rights under the law.

Market incentives and the threat of punishment are not sufficient for pro-social motivations and behaviors in many circumstances. And democratic societies require a special kind of pro-social motivation – the motivation to endorse and to comply with democratic processes, even in cases where one might be better off by subverting the rules or going around them. Members of society need to see each other as passengers on the same ship, sharing a common fate. And it's especially hard to build a cooperative and solidaristic ethos when, to continue with my metaphor, rich members of society, can easily sail away on their yachts.

The tendency of elites to lose touch with the rest of society has been widely observed. One could see the underlying pathology on display in the wake of the Occupy movement, when a spate of articles began to appear, written by members of the top 1 percent, explaining that they weren't all that rich, given the price of private schools, real estate, yoga classes, vacations and so on. Writing against the existence of private (e.g., ‘public’) schools in England, the social democrat RH Tawney observed,

Arguably, a democratic society requires certain experiences where everyone is on an equal footing and everyone is treated the same: standing in line to vote, or to get a driver's license, for instance. Some theorists have called these situations points of ‘forced solidarity’. Among other things, they serve as a check on the tendency for the ultra-rich to drift off into their own little world, and to insulate themselves from the travails of the ordinary person. They put us – at least for a time – in the same boat. In today's America, few of these points of forced solidarity remain.

The unmooring of elites from the majority of other citizens has two negative effects on society. First, since elites currently have disproportionate power in shaping national policy (Gilens, Reference Gilens2012), policies are proposed with little understanding of the effects of those policies on others. It is also easy to endorse policies that can have harmful effects on others but that one's privilege can make one immune to. Second, the ability of the wealthy to exit from the effects of a policy, can weaken the bargaining power and voice of those who remain. (This is a familiar observation about the interactions of what Albert Hirschman referred to as ‘exit’ and ‘voice’).

It is too easy for groups in society to lack basic understandings of each other. Polarized and fragmented along economic, racial and ideological lines, democratic societies seem incapable of addressing their most urgent social problems.

3. National Service: A new common experience

It is here, first and foremost, that I believe an argument for a universal service requirement arises. There are few bridging institutions – at least in the United States – that bring individuals together across their differences in contexts where they can relate to one another as equals. Schools and neighborhoods are deeply segregated by race and class. White nationalism is on the rise. Rural communities do not interact with urban ones; workplaces are hierarchically organized and the lives of managers and CEOs more isolated and different than ever from those of their employees. People congregate in on-line bubbles with the like-minded; there are separate lines at airports; private and public schools; in the US there are even public roads with faster traffic that are available for a fee. The rules of the game have been tilted to favor elites. The idea that we are all in this together has a hollow ring.

A carefully constructed national service program can respond to these problems. It can bring citizens together, across their differences, by mixing service groups across race, class and geographic divisions. Decades ago, the social psychologist Gordon Allport, showed that racial and other prejudices flourish in ignorance, but that close interracial contact can reduce stereotyping and hostility – if the contact is of a type that leads people to do things together (Allport, Reference Allport1954). Allport also posited that the effects of such contact are greatly enhanced if ‘sanctioned by institutional supports’. Allport's contact hypothesis is one of the most widely tested claims in social psychology. Meta-analyses of hundreds of studies show strong support for the hypothesis as applied to numerous group divisions.

My proposal is to establish a mandatory year of national service for all US citizens between the ages of 18 and 25, with an exemption only for those doing military service or those with underlying conditions that make it impossible for them to serve. This program would involve participants in the creation of public goods – whether maintenance of public lands; work on infrastructure projects; work in education; work with the elderly, or other kinds of public projects. Rigorous studies have shown that America's voluntary service corps – from the Depression's Civilian Conservation Corps to the Great Society's Peace Corps and VISTA provided young people with the time and space to gain experience and acquire useful work skills and directions. These are important private benefits to individuals. (They do have a public benefit as well in contributing to the economy.) The voluntary service programs that today operate in this space, such as AmeriCorps, do good work and have stunningly high approval ratingsFootnote ³ from their alumni: Ninety-four percent say they gained a better understanding of differing communities; eighty percent say the program helped their careers. But the argument I am offering is not based in the private goods to individuals that service offers, but the democratic good it produces.

A number of proposals have been offered for national service in the last several years but few of them advocate mandatory service. In fact, there is a timidity about most such proposals given the proponents’ diagnosis of the problem. While there are reasons for this caution, which I will discuss below, allowing exit is problematic from the perspective defended here. Volunteer programs cannot deliver their desired cultural effects if select groups (e.g., the wealthy and privileged) can easily opt out and if service opportunities are unequally distributed. It is by helping to dismantle racial, socio-economic and geographical barriers between people, and by creating common experiences, that national service creates it's most important public good – enhancing the relationships and mutual understanding among the participants themselves.

An integrated military draft once played a similar role. And even before the military was racially integrated, it did mix people up by social class. Consider President John F Kennedy's PT boat in World War 2; Kennedy was the son of one of the richest men in America. But on his boat – in the same boat – were the sons of a farmer, a plumber, an artist, and an auto mechanic.

There is no doubt that a national service program would have costs. It would involve oversight and planning. Participants should also be paid a modest income, and possibly receive benefits not unlike the GI bill – a law that provides educational and training benefits for military veterans. At the same time, there are economic benefits: there is a great deal of valuable work that is not currently being done, and that could be done through public service. The New Deal yielded the Civilian Conservation Corps, which mobilized, with the leadership of a young George Marshall, 3 million unemployed Americans who planted some 3 billion trees between 1933 and 1942. An analysis commissioned by the National Park ServiceFootnote ⁴ found if the government were to try and reduce the backlog of maintenance on public lands using conservation corps (made up of 18- to 25-year-olds considering land management as a career) rather than contractors of National Park Service crews, it would save more than 80% per project.

4. Objections