The term ‘active citizenship’, as it appears in European welfare policy, embraces a range of activities that people engage in to exercise influence and to act as co-producers alongside governments (see chapter 1). Even though the term has not been coined as a buzzword in Norway as it has in the UK and the Netherlands,1 the idea that citizens should participate in and assume responsibility for the implementation of welfare programmes has been at the very centre of Norwegian welfare policy. The comprehensive welfare commitment characteristic of Scandinavian countries has not worked on the assumption that people are essentially passive or disengaged. Even though debates often tend to be dominated by a narrow rights-dominated (passive) version of socio-liberal citizenship (Johansson & Hvinden 2007), policymakers have regularly evoked notions of the active citizen in the hope that people will cooperate to realise ambitious welfare goals. According to the political scientist Bo Rothstein (1998: 35-37), Scandinavian social policy has been characterised by a communitarian/perfectionist principle that portrays the relation between the state and citizen as organic in character. In contrast to the liberal ideal stressing that the state should assume a neutral posture, that is, vis-à-vis an individual's choice of a life project, the communitarian/ perfectionist ideal enjoins the state to take a stand in favour of certain collective moral principles and thus to hold out certain life projects as more desirable than others. In concrete actions, the state intervenes in civil society and tries to influence our values, for example by subsidising organisations that are assumed to work for commendable values and practices – whether these be temperance, solidarity with the Third World, participation in sports or healthy eating habits. However, more recent welfare discourses have been influenced by a liberal turn. Citizens are now increasingly viewed as autonomous rights holders and consumers acting with distant scepticism towards the service-providing state.

This chapter explores the underlying mechanisms behind these changing depictions of the state-citizen relation. Focusing on the Norwegian elderly care sector, an examination is made of how notions of citizenship have been reshaped through different eras of welfare reform. Based on the idea that politicians will seek support from the electorate, an exploration is also made into how citizens themselves have influenced reforms and accordingly contributed to shaping and sustaining images of statecitizen relations.