outlines the history of citizenship as a political concept, showing that the dominant view of citizenship today is still primarily seen as nationally provided and tied inextricably to legal status, despite global and urban scholars challenging its claims of exclusivity and immigration scholars challenging its singular focus on legal status. The limited power of these critiques is due, in part, to the fuzziness of claims regarding rights and identities. The authors make a fresh start in the systematic conceptualization of citizenship, showing that legal status is not the gateway to rights as is often assumed. In its place, they develop a concept of federated citizenship as a parallel set of rights along five key dimensions, with the provision of those rights varying by jurisdiction – federal, state, and local. They also lay out important differences between progressive citizenship, regressive citizenship, and reinforcing citizenship. Finally, they move from concept formation to the development of indicators for state citizenship regimes, which sets the stage for the empirical analysis is subsequent chapters on Black citizenship rights and immigrant citizenship rights.

Chapter 6 describes how some local governments have given rights of citizenship, including voting rights, to nonresident landowners; in some cases, municipalities have actually limited the franchise exclusively to landowners. Once again, this is indicative of the distinctive nature of local citizenship. Property ownership ceased being a prerequisite for voting in state and federal elections by the 1850s, as citizenship was coming to be seen primarily in ethno-nationalist terms as a matter of shared identity. Local governments, reflecting their history as commercial entities, have been more open to tying the franchise to landownership, and as a de facto matter, many cities today use zoning regulations to ensure that anyone who cannot afford to purchase a home cannot acquire residence, and therefore the right to vote. This de facto property qualification for local citizenship illustrates that local citizenship is constructed as purely private and liberal, predicated upon consumer choice, mobility, and self-interest rather than identity or civic activity.

By the late nineteenth century the prevailing ethno-nationalist ethos of the day established that noncitizens were incapable of federal citizenship because of both racial distinctions and questions about their loyalty. At the same time, however, local citizenship was coming to be understood as something entirely different, determined by mobility and choice rather than loyalty and identity. Some cities have accordingly granted the right of suffrage to noncitizen residents on the grounds that they share a common interest with other local residents in the provision of municipal services. Perhaps more importantly, cities are required to give noncitizens many “social rights” that have increasingly come to be synonymous with citizenship, such as education and security. Noncitizens have been granted these social rights on the premise that such rights should be distributed based on residence rather than nationality. In order to make local citizenship a matter of private consumer choice, local services are bundled together with residence so that local “consumer-voters” can more efficiently shop for municipalities in which to settle.

This introduction provides an overview of the argument of the book. Although citizenship is often believed to reside exclusively at the national scale, the introduction describes how there is a distinctively local idea of citizenship that exists alongside federal citizenship. Where federal citizenship is distributed based on nationality, local citizenship has generally been made available to all residents regardless of nationality. Although local and federal citizenship have long been complementary, globalization is now causing them to come into conflict. That Donald Trump was elected on a stridently nationalistic, anti-immigrant, and anti-urban political platform at the same time that cities like San Francisco extended local voting rights to noncitizen residents who are ineligible to vote in state and federal elections illustrates how divergent ideas about local and federal citizenship are the sources of a major political crisis.

Chapter 4 presents the historical case of women’s suffrage. Though prior to the Nineteenth Amendment women were deemed unsuited for citizenship at the national level because their designated role was exclusively within the private sphere of the home rather than the public sphere of politics, they nevertheless attained the right to vote in local elections in many places because the municipality was itself perceived as a private, home-like sphere dedicated to quotidian functions like the care of children that fell squarely within women’s sphere. Granting women the right to vote in local elections was thus consistent with the idea that local citizenship was qualitatively distinct from national citizenship.

Chapter 3 presents a brief history of local citizenship that describes the process by which our ideas about citizenship came to be divided between federal and local scales. Our bifurcated conception of citizenship was a highly contingent product of the nation-state’s long evolution from the ancient city-state. There was never a conscious decision to divide citizenship the way we did.

Chapter 2 details how the distinction between the public and private spheres of citizenship has been implemented through jurisdictional scale, or federalism. Through a mosaic of laws regarding suffrage, immigration, education and public benefits, zoning, civil rights and others, our federal system has designated the national government as the public sphere of identity and civic activity, and local governments as the private sphere of the market and the family. The potential for conflict among the various conceptions of citizenship is muted because their contradictory components are divided into separate spheres and each is then confined to its designated sphere. This chapter also describes, however, how globalization has caused the public/private distinction to break down, and with it, the line between local and national citizenship to become blurred. As that has happened, the contradictions among the three conceptions of citizenship have become more pronounced, resulting in a crisis in the meaning of citizenship and increasing hostility between cities and the state.