This study is based on the premise that information is necessary to exercise the social rights of citizenship. A lack of information, or ‘information poverty’, can result in a lack of access to (and denial of) those rights. This chapter provides the theoretical framework of this book. It argues that citizenship provides a valuable underlying concept for exploring the questions addressed here. It questions the nature of citizenship, the rights and responsibilities of both the state and its citizens, and explores the implications of these for information policy.

Citizenship is a contested and problematic concept and it is important to consider the difficulties it presents. However, more than any other major concept in social policy, citizenship highlights the central role of information for an individual's access to welfare. It is intrinsic to the concept that welfare state services, and by implication the information provided about them, are available to each and every person (subject to qualifying conditions). Other concepts, such as consumerism or paternalism, do not demand that information should be available to everyone about all benefits.

This chapter also asserts that social citizenship provides a justification for the welfare state and a yardstick by which to analyse and measure social policies. Other less inclusive arguments for welfare provision are concerned with deciding who is and who is not deserving, and in policies that legitimise targeting or selective information provision. These result in corresponding choices about who receives information, and risk creating ‘information poverty’.

The distinction needs to be made early on between information about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship on the one hand, and information about the nature of citizenship itself on the other. This book is about the former. The latter – what it is to be a good citizen – is currently the focus of debate, especially within education policy. In 2002, citizenship became a compulsory curriculum subject in secondary schools.

The concept of citizenship

The concept of citizenship was devised as, and continues to be invoked in defence of, a feeling of shared identity and community. Although it remains a contested notion, citizenship is a mechanism for regarding all people as equal in a way which is unrelated to – and irrespective of – social and economic inequalities.