Iranian Journal of Sociology

Abstract Changes in approaches for citizenship discourse led to a new definition of citizenship. This definition, as a legal base, emphasizes the role of citizens as actors in the society, politics, government. The formation of the active citizenship concept is rooted in this approach. In this paper active citizenship means the ability of people to involve in various types of social and political actions, with the aim of decision making and having influence based on mutual respect and non-violence. However, the results of different empirical studies reveal that the amount of citizenship realization in society is not desirable, and the majority of Tehrani citizens are passive individuals. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to study the status of active citizenship in Tehran and its influential factors. The research method is a survey and the population includes all Tehrani citizens aged above 18 years old. The sample size was 1200 and the stratified sampling method is used to select correspondent. The data collection tool was a questionnaire with more than 0.7 formal and reliable validity.
The correlation test results showed that there was a significant  relationship between enjoying citizenship rights, media consumption, and universalism with active citizenship. Plus, there was an indirect relationship between the sense of social deprivation and the feeling of powerlessness. In addition, multivariate regression results indicated that 40% of the changes in the active citizenship variable were explained by independent variables. Also, the enjoyment of citizenship rights with the beta coefficient of 0.25 had the most impact on active citizenship.  The findings also demonstrated that the feeling of powerlessness, the sense of social deprivation, lack of civic skills or distrust to the impact of social involvement in changing economic and welfare situation of society, are the most important barriers of active citizenship. Although citizens are familiar with political knowledge and interest, civic duties, and legitimacy, they are unaware of civic skills and the means of social and political participation. or do not consider the current space and collaborative methods to advance their mental interests. The main need for active citizenship is the skill of converting demands into participation.
 
 

Abstract Citizenship is not only a social status but also a social role which, based on the way it is perceived, the agent influence their position. The citizenship role, like any other social role, is composed of the norms which form the underlying rights and obligations in it. In every society, the kind of attitude towards these norms stabilizes a special kind of citizenship status. In this article, to design a normative pattern, we review the political and sociological literature. For this purpose, the citizenship role is divided into two parts of rights and obligations and then three ethical, social and legal normative groups have been identified in this role. After construction of the mentioned pattern, the following question is investigated: what is our citizens’ attitude towards the constructed pattern? We employed a survey and questionnaires to gather the data. The population was Tehrani citizens above 18 years old and 401 respondents were selected as the sample. The findings indicate that the highest positive attitude is for the legal norms and the least degree of positive attitudes is for ethical norms. The findings make our pattern more similar to the Eastern Europe's norms of citizenship.