Abstract

In political science, the theme of critical citizenship is often interpreted negatively and understood to express distrust. However, criticism can be motivated by positive aspirations towards democracy and how to improve it. In order to test this idea, we asked respondents to the Democracy and citizenship survey to rank how the features of different types of democratic legitimacy appealed to them. The module adopted an innovative methodology by bringing together philosophy (political theory) and political science. This approach led to a series of results that tempered and questioned the more prevalent pessimistic understandings of critical citizenship. Furthermore, this article looks closely at controversy surrounding the meaning ascribed to criticism and discusses the presuppositions made by many political sociology studies and their differing hypotheses on critical citizenship. It shows that the very definition of criticism remains unclear and proposes a ‘critical understanding of criticism’ adopting a meta-critical stance (as is often the case in philosophy) to better identify four possible types of criticism: reactive criticism (primary), evaluative, propositional (first or secondary order) and pluralist political criticism.