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= **What Does it Mean To Be a Good Citizen?** =

The determination as to what is considered a good citizen has been debated by many throughout human history. To properly analyze what it means to be a good citizen one must first define what a citizen is. According to Merriam-Websters Dictionary, a citizen is a a person owing allegiance to and entitled to the protection of a sovereign state where power is retained by the people and sharing in political rights of those people, or rather the rights of a free citizen.

How one chooses to use these rights is often the central topic of what makes a good citizen, or rather what it means to //be// a citizen. In the interest of protecting and maintaining these rights and liberties, citizens are obligated to certain actions within the government such as voting, paying taxes, serving on juries, serving in one's military, or even serving within the daily governance structure itself. These actions quite literally maintain the government, which in turn is the surest means for protecting the citizens as well as their rights and liberties through the use of laws and the execution of those laws.

These responsibilities and actions are often quite vast, as there are numerous governmental systems in use throughout the world, with different methods providing for the maintenance of government, leading in turn to the varying duties and actions of citizens within those systems of government. The opinions on what actions make a good citizen vary even wider that the government systems themselves. If one were to look at the definition of being a citizen, it becomes clear that if a citizen "//owes allegiance to a sovereign state where power is retained by the people//," a citizen's allegiance and obligations are actually to themselves and fellow people living within that state. Since the people are retaining the power and therefore ultimately responsible for providing for the common defense of their rights and protection, it stands to reason that being a good citizen would entail maintaining ones political rights within that sovereign state's system of government in order to ultimately provide and maintain that government system.

Obviously one dictionary's opinion on the matter doesn't necessarily make it fact, but utilizing it to provide for a general understanding of what it means to be a good citizen allows us to, in a way, circumnavigate the myriad of opinions and come to a basic crux: That being a good citizen involves acting within one's sovereign state's system of government so as to best maintain the protections and rights granted them by said government. Using this as our understanding we can look at the differences in civic duties of citizens within some of the government systems used in the past or still in use today and see what being a good citizen in each, according to our definition, entails as well as how it differs depending on the sovereign state's system of government.