Comparing Agentic Meritocratic Citizenship in Europe and China: A Research Note

Since the 1990s, global cultural shifts driven by neoliberalism have ushered in significant changes in the institutions of citizenship. This has given rise to an increasingly agentic conception of the individual, with strong meritocratic ideological underpinnings, as manifested across a wide range of policy and institutional domains. While the normative foundations and the institutional embodiment of agentic citizenship are widely studied, we know less about the individual enactments of such citizenship. We present comparative evidence on agentic and meritocratic orientations and their relationship with solidaristic inclinations among higher education students in China and Europe.