The authors of this ambitious book, Allan Colbern and S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, pursue three related tasks. Their driving concern is to delineate how and why we should see state citizenship in the United States as too autonomous to subsume under national citizenship. Instead, we should recognize that US citizenship must be analyzed as a system of federalism in which both citizenships matter.
Because the academic scholarship on citizenship displays numerous, not obviously compatible conceptions of citizenship, however, the authors first seek to offer an appropriate definition of citizenship. They prefer one arising from historical institutionalist approaches to American political development. Because those approaches also display numerous, not obviously compatible theoretical frameworks, they seek also to lay out what an historical institutionalist analysis of citizenship should involve and to trace its applications throughout the whole history of the United States and in more depth in regard to African Americans and Californians. Though it is tempting to suggest they are chewing more than they have really bitten off, their arguments rest on a truly impressive mastery of pertinent scholarship. More importantly, they end up making the strong case for the great significance of state citizenship in America today that they had set out to do.
Their execution of their two preliminary tasks is both sensible and stimulating, if perhaps inevitably less definitive. After canvassing how citizenship is sometimes treated as a legal status, sometimes as a psychological sense of belonging, and sometimes as a set of participatory activities, among other variations, they worry that these usages fall into what Giovanni Sartori famously criticized as “conceptual stretching,” making a concept do more than it was fashioned to do. They prefer to define citizenship simply as “the provision of rights by a political jurisdiction to its members” (p. 35). They specify that the rights in question are of five kinds: rights to free movement; rights to due process and legal protection; rights to develop human capital through education, health care, and work, among other means; rights to participate in and be represented in a society’s political institutions; and rights to have one’s identity and belonging, including one’s ethnic and (presumably) religious identity, recognized by those institutions (p. 41).
This is a reasonable definition and highly serviceable for their purposes, and that is all it really needs to be. Although the dangers of “conceptual stretching” are real, especially in scholarly analyses, there are counterpart dangers to what we might call “conceptual Bogarting”: insisting that one’s preferred definition of a concept is THE definition of that concept, other understandings be damned. Though the authors do not quite step into that pitfall, at times they tread near it. There is, however, no good reason to tell Diogenes that he cannot call himself a “citizen of the world,” or St. Augustine that the “City of God” does not have “citizens,” or the many contemporary scholars of “lived citizenship” that they cannot use that term for people to whom no political jurisdiction accords the pertinent legal rights. It is sufficient to explain, as Colbern and Ramakrishnan do, why a particular definition of citizenship is the right one for the project they are undertaking. To show that legal citizenship in the American states merits study alongside and in relationship to legal citizenship in the United States, it makes sense to define citizenship in terms of the legal rights that a political jurisdiction accords its members.
To put this definition to work, the authors offer an historical institutionalist “explanatory framework specific to the US context” that maps developments in the nation’s federal system of national and state citizenships in terms of three factors. First are the constitutional opportunities for developments in citizenship statuses, shaped by the Constitution’s text and prevailing judicial interpretations of it. Second are legislative actions on those opportunities, usually driven by the activities of political parties and social movements. Third are executive actions that either implement legislated policies or are undertaken unilaterally (p. 72).
The authors use this framework to delineate three major eras in the development of American federalism and citizenship: the period of “the framers’ Constitution,” up to the Civil War; the “separate and unequal” period following the defeat of Reconstruction; and the modern “civil rights” period (p. 82). After briefly sketching major developments in each of these periods, the authors devote one chapter to a closer look at the development of African American state and national citizenships, and another to the development of state citizenship (still in relation to national citizenship) in California. The Golden State is revealing because of how it moved from highly restrictive, white-privileging citizenship policies right up through the 1990s to, especially since 2015, highly progressive state conceptions that define their five rights of citizenship expansively and inclusively. Colbern and Ramakrishnan next consider state citizenship policies, in California and other states, specifically in relation to national immigration policies, particularly in the modern, third period of federalism and citizenship. Then, building especially on this and the California chapter, they conclude with a brief chapter arguing that there is the potential now for advocacy groups in many more states to organize and win progressive citizenship policies in ways that may eventually work to transform national policies.
This is the punchline toward which the book has been building, and it is persuasive—all the more so because the authors recognize that, in many states, parties, social movements, legislatures, and executives are all choosing simply to mirror and reinforce national immigration policies, whereas in others they are resisting them, partly through regressive, exclusionary citizenship policies. The takeaway message—that the politics of contestation over citizenship in America today cannot be understood without grasping the battles over citizenship within states and between states and the nation—is a tremendously important one. If it does not quite amount to citizenship radically “reimagined,” it certainly represents citizenship significantly “refocused.”
Some caveats are, however, in order. Though the authors say their framework of “constitutional opportunities/legislative actions/executive actions” is “explanatory,” it really simply identifies pertinent political structures and actors. By itself, it does not explain why those actors do what they do. The authors’ subsequent applications of this framework do occasionally invoke ideas like “White supremacist views” (p. 158) and economic interests like those stirred by the end of gold mining and an ensuing recession (p. 226). However, they make no real effort to theorize the drivers of either state or national citizenship policies. Theirs is far more an endeavor of descriptive mapping than causal inquiry. Overall, they provide very useful maps based on commendable syntheses of an exceptional range of sources. Nonetheless, their original contributions come chiefly in the final three chapters, which draw more extensively on their own primary research on recent issues of state citizenship and immigration.
The preliminary chapters do, however, provide much food for thought on how to think about federated state and national citizenships in general and specifically in the United States. And again, the final chapters emphatically show that we must attend to both forms of citizenship, and their interactions, to understand citizenship in the United States today. That is a worthwhile and commendable achievement, valuable for scholars, students, and citizens alike.
