Citizenship is most commonly defined as a legal standing that connotes membership in a national polity, the guarantee of rights, and consent to obligations associated with membership. Layered onto this definition are other meanings that address substantive aspects of citizenship, commonly described in terms of an individual's public standing in a political community. These different definitions reflect competing theoretical and normative perspectives on citizenship and citizenship's spatiality. Such perspectives are codified in laws and relationships that affect the ways in which individuals become recognized as citizens, the processes of citizenship formation, and the relationships between citizenship and democracy.