Citizenship in social and political psychology: A relational and future‐oriented framework for the study of everyday citizenship practice

Abstract This article presents a social‐political psychological approach to citizenship, arguing that this approach is particularly useful for understanding contemporary politics. We discuss political changes that bring the concept of citizenship to the center of sociopolitical psychological analysis and necessitate a systematic reapproach to it to capture its complexity. We introduce a relational and process‐based approach to citizenship that incorporates both its more habitual and confirmatory dimensions and its more transgressive and future potentialities. Our theoretical framework is interdisciplinary, drawing from critical social‐political psychological work on citizenship (mainly critical discursive psychology and social representations theory) and from citizenship studies literature. The final section of the article builds upon this framework to introduce the concept of the “citizenship project” as a political vision that advances an alternative constellation of citizenship rights and duties. We exemplify this final point using Brexit as a case study that illustrates the emergence of varied citizenship projects, each with its own ideological history and political agenda.