A citizen is a member of a political community or state with a set of rights and a set of responsibilities towards that community. These rights and responsibilities allow citizens to participate in the life of their community. Civil participation is required for constitutional government (based on a social contract) to work and is thus measured as an indicator of government performance.

The political theorist T. H. Marshall (1950) distinguished between three ‘bundles of rights’: civil rights, political rights and social rights in order to evaluate government performance.

1. How well does the government provide its citizens with civil rights?

Civil rights were defined by Marshall as ‘rights necessary for individual freedom’. These include freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of conscience, the right to equality before the law, and the right to own property.

2. How well does the government provide its citizens with political rights?

Political rights provide the individual with the opportunity to participate in political life. The central political rights are thus the right to vote, the right to stand for election, and the right to hold public office. The provision of political rights clearly requires the development of universal suffrage, the rights to freedom of association and assembly, political equality and democratic government.

3. How well does the government provide its citizens with social rights?

Social rights, Marshall argued, are those that that guarantee the individual an adequate quality of life. This includes basic income, housing, health, food and access to clean water. These rights ensure that a citizen’s basic needs are met, and therefore provide the basis for the exercise of both civil and political rights.

A dilemma related to applying citizenship performance criteria is that the empowerment of the individual must be balanced against the empowerment of the community. To give priority to personal autonomy means placing limits on public authority. However, popular rule can lead to the subordination of the individual to the will of the public or the majority.

The Individual Rights View

Supporters of individual rights claim that these civil, political and social rights are the foundation of the social contract between the citizen and the state. They say that the amount of rights that citizens effectively have, can and should be used an indicator of how well this contract is working and can therefore be used to evaluate the performance of government.

Responsibilities to Community View
Supporters of community rights argue that community unity is a more important indicator than individual rights for government performance. They claim that focusing on individual rights weakens the communal bonds that hold society together. From this perspective, societies that may appear to perform poorly in relation to individual rights indicators (with, for example, poor records on human rights) may nevertheless succeed in creating a stronger sense of community unity.