Citizen-consumers
New Labour's marketplace democracy

By Catherine Needham

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Introduction

• The government-citizen relationship is increasingly being remodelled along consumerist lines. It is essential to understand how and why consumerism has taken such a strong hold on public life, to diagnose the dangers it presents, and to identify the viable alternatives.

2. New Labour and the citizen

• On arriving in power New Labour signalled a change of emphasis towards a more active and substantive conception of citizenship from that of the Conservatives. Six years on the state of the government-citizenship relationship is not in a robust state of health, and on a downward trajectory.

3. Treating citizens as consumers

• The meaning and content of citizenship has always been subject to interpretation and political contestation. To claim that citizens are being treated as consumers is to say that the government-citizen relationship is replicating patterns of choice and power found in the private economy.
• The consumer is primarily self-regarding, forms preferences without reference to others, and acts through a series of instrumental, temporary bilateral relationships. Accountability is secured by competition and complaint, and power exercised through aggregate signalling.
• The citizen-consumer can be contrasted with an alternative model of participatory citizenship centred on concern for a common interest, collective deliberation and discussion, loyalty to the political community and the value of public engagement as a good in itself.

4. The consumerisation of citizenship
• The claim that citizenship is being consumerised can be supported through examination of key points of interaction between government and citizen: communication, consultation and service delivery.
• Government communications are taking an increasingly promotional and top- down form. This is manifested in the government's internalisation of the language and techniques of commercial marketing and the shaping of information by "presentational" concerns.
• Government consultation exercises are focused on self-regarding individual responses without collective discussion, and concern personal experiences of policies and services rather than political questions behind them.
• The government's agenda for public service reform is concentrated on an objective of maximising "customer satisfaction" and expanding individual choice and competition.

5. Why are citizens being treated as consumers?

• Consumerisation is presented as a response to demand and a result of social and cultural change. Such analyses lack sociological nuance and critical perspective: the tension of such trends with egalitarian and public objectives must be confronted.

6. The costs of consumerism

• There are limits to the relevance of consumerism to the public sector. Choice may be impossible to institute, have perverse effects, and may not be what is most wanted by service users. Use of complaint mechanisms is uneven across socio-economic groups and may have distorting effects.
• The fundamental danger is that consumerism may be fostering privatised and resentful citizens whose expectations of government can never be met, and cannot develop the concern for the public good that must be the foundation of democratic engagement and support for public services.

7. Alternatives to consumerism

• Current notions of active citizenship, community, co-production and voluntarism provide starting points for the development of alternatives. But to avoid the wrong turnings of individualism and statelessness we must look to accounts of political belonging offered by civic republican traditions.

8. Conclusion

• Consumerism provides no answer to the most fundamental questions of politics and the public good. Compared to a passive clientelism consumer empowerment can sound appealing. But against the promise of a robust and active participatory citizenship, it is revealed as flimsy and redundant.

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