Abstract
In many Third Wave democracies large classes of people experience diminished forms of citizenship. The systematic exclusion from mandated public goods and services significantly injures the citizenship and life chances of entire social groups. In democratic theory civil associations have a fundamental role to play in reversing this reality. One strand of theory, known as civic engagement, suggests that associations empower their members to engage in public politics, hold state officials to account, claim public services, and thereby improve the quality of democracy. Empirical demonstration of the argument is surprisingly rare, however, and limited to affluent democracies. In this article, we use original survey data for two large cities in Third Wave democracies—São Paulo and Mexico City—to explore this argument in a novel way. We focus on the extent to which participation in associations (or associationalism) increases “active citizenship”—the effort to negotiate directly with state agents access to goods and services legally mandated for public provision, such as healthcare, sanitation, and security—rather than civic engagement, which encompasses any voluntary and public spirited activity. We examine separately associationalism’s impact on the quality of citizenship, a dimension that varies independently from the level of active citizenship, by assessing differences in the types of citizenship practices individuals use to obtain access to vital goods and services. To interpret the findings, and identify possible causal pathways, the paper moves back-and-forth between two major research traditions that are rarely brought into dialogue: civic engagement and comparative historical studies of democratization.
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Notes
Recent literature on citizenship in Brazil and Mexico by-and-large focuses on the legal citizenship regimes that are supplanting the 20th century corporatist regime that bound citizens by functional groups to the state—a radical-democratic citizenship regime (with strong participation governance institutions) in Brazil (Dagnino 2007) and a multicultural regime providing indigenous peoples collective rights and cultural autonomy in Mexico (Lomnitz 2001). The aspects of citizens’ day-to-day relations to the state explored in Latin America are police violation of civil liberties and impunity from justice (Méndez et al. 1999; Davis 2006).
Like Somers (1993), our starting point is T.H. Marshall's notion of citizenship as full and equal membership in a political community and citizenship rights as mutually enforceable claims.
For example, voters seek the intervention of their congressmen to expedite requests for zoning or commercial licenses, or to arrange meetings with the relevant decision-making authorities. The brokerage in this case does not require the individual to give up a political right, and is therefore less costly to the individual and less injurious to the quality of citizenship.
In Mexico City, where collective self-provisioning is high, 10% of such activity reported was organized through a local association (88% of the reported activity was undertaken with family and acquintances, without the involvement of an association). Of the people in São Paulo and Mexico City who engaged in institutional petitioning, 10% and 9% respectively reported having had the support of associations, though in many instances these were not associations in which they reported participation. Of the people who petitioned the state in São Paulo, 57% did so alone and 33% with family or acquaintances; Mexico City has the reverse pattern, with 38% alone and 52% with family or acquaintances.
Under civic engagement we included survey research on political participation, such as that by Rosenstone and Hansen (1993). Civic engagement in this literature is usually defined very broadly as “activity that is intended to or has the consequence of affecting, either directly or indirectly, government action,” which includes, alongside electoral-partisan activity, any “informal activity in local communities, contacts with public officials … and service on local governing bodies such as schools or zoning boards” (Verba et al. 1995: 9).
For a partial exception, see the publications of the Johns Hopkins Comparative NonProfit Sector Project, such as Anheier and Salamon 1998.
Although Skocpol (2003: chapter 4) documents the rise of non-membership formations such as social movements and professionalized advocacy organizations.
In the latter case, the individual has entered the public realm to address a concern over public order, a constitutive component of citizenship and a precondition for the fulfillment of other rights.
There is an unsettled debate about the sources of measurement error in survey research, but some agreement that the reliability of interviewees’ answers vary according to the length of the recall period, the retrieval strategy (episodic enumeration versus estimation), and the nature of the information solicited (Bound et al. 2001: 3743–3745; Mathiowetz 2000). For information that is particularly difficult to recall, for example frequently recurring and/or non-descript activities, a year recall period is often adopted. For information on activities that are less recurrent and easier to remember longer recall periods are justified. This is the case in our analysis.
The exact question in this case was “Sometimes people join together to solve problems on their own. For example, by organizing a rotating credit fund or helping in home construction. Have you taken part in any kinds of activities like these?”
In the survey, citizens in the two cities report having acted to address the same types of problems in domains such as these. The nature of the problem in these domains may have varied.
We do not distinguish between organizing and participating in these activities.
The authors thank Adrian Gurza Lavalle for this insight.
The World Values Survey (2005), for example, asks respondents if they are “active members,” “inactive members,” or “not members,” and Verba et al. (1995: 542–549) use”‘member of ...”’ In Brazil the 2000 Demographic Census (IBGE 1996, 2001) and São Paulo state’s Well-Being study (SEADE 1998) use formal membership. Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute’s (IFI) “Encuesta Nacional sobra Cultura Política y Practicas Cuidadanas 2003” uses a definition similar to ours, “participation in …,” but unfortunately does not specify a time period (INEGI 2003).
Religious groups’ lack of impact on active citizenship in Brazil and Mexico likely reflects differences between Catholicism and U.S. Protestantism. The “Catholic Puzzle”—high Church involvement, teachings that emphasize participation in community life, but low levels of civic activity—appears related to structural features of the Catholic Church (Bane 2005). Verba et al. (1995: 245, 381) argue that, in the United States, the large size of Catholic parishes, limited opportunities for lay participation in liturgical activities, and hierarchical organization mean that Catholic church-goers have fewer opportunities to acquire public skills than their Protestant counterparts. The structure of the Catholic Church in Latin America is, if anything, more hierarchical, and São Paulo and Mexico City parishes tend to have particularly large congregations. Putnam (1993) makes a similar argument for Italy.
We use dichotomous, rather than continuous, education variables because the years of educational attainment are strongly clustered around final year of primary, secondary, and higher education. These markers provide convenient definitions of the education component of class. Therefore we use variables for each of the three education categories. Because the share of the population with no years of formal schooling is below 4%, we include this stratum in the category Primary education or less.
This definition is for the principal work, and similar to that used by CEPAL and the ILO (Comin 2003).
Selection was random at all three stages of the sampling process: census sectors were selected using 2000 Census data, a recount of households in the selected sectors was undertaken before randomizing household selection, and at the household level we used a kish selection procedure.
The share of the population with brokered practices is similar in the two cities and surprisingly low given the characterization of politics found in the literature on Latin America. Only part of the discrepancies between our findings and accounts in the literature can be explained by our choice of cases—the largest urban centers rather than national political systems—and by some under-reporting.
These are weighted values from the sample population, we use population for short.
Dependent variables are italicised. We will italicize active citizen or active citizenship in most contexts below.
The issue area where there is significant difference between the cities is Basic Needs: 78% of the São Paulo sample but only 48% of the Mexico City sample said government had primary responsibility for helping meet basic needs such as food, clothing and housing.
Our definition of associationalism casts a wider net than those using current and formal membership, and the values we report lie at the higher end of those reported in other studies. Current participation was 22% and 21% in São Paulo and Mexico City, respectively. The intensity of participation in community associations is similar in the cities: from on average 3 times a month in the activities of neighborhood associations—such as meetings or events—to twice a week in cultural or leisure associations. Participation in workplace associations is less intense: 0.5 and 1.5 times a month, in São Paulo and Mexico City respectively.
The shares of the population in the two cities that participate in associations and are active citizens are 17% in São Paulo and 24.4% in Mexico City. The higher percentage in Mexico City reflects the larger share of the population that is active in that city.
Among those who are active, 33% of those without associationalism petition government while the corresponding figure for those with associational membership is 32.5%.
The residuals of the estimates are roughly normal.
The tables present the coefficient of the explanatory factors in the (multivariate) probit analysis and indicate whether a factor is a statistically significant explanatory variable, indicated by a p-value of less than 0.05 for strong significance and 0.1 for weak significance.
Inclusion of income categories alters the results only when these are reduced to two categories—low and high—which makes the low income group weakly significant. There is, however, some correlation between income and educational categories.
The finer education categories used in São Paulo—primary or below, secondary and higher—were not significant in Mexico City, but the re-aggregated categories were.
Regional variables and being black in São Paulo were occasionally significant. In Mexico City variables describing family structures, age, and some regional variables play a weak role.
The education gap in Mexico City is less extreme than in São Paulo, but it is nonetheless evident. In addition, women are less likely than men to participate in associations: 41% of men but only 24% of women participate in São Paulo, and 39% of men and 25% of women in Mexico City.
The level of social-economic inequality in the two cities around the time of the survey was similar: the HDI was 0.841 and 0.8775 in 2000 for São Paulo and Mexico City respectively. The Income Index was 0.843 and 0.902 that year.
The failure of an adequate state response to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake is also a likely trigger for the unusually high level of collective self-provisioning found in the city.
Results are available from the authors.
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Acknowledgements
We appreciate the thoughtful comments of our collaborators on the IDS-CEBRAP-LSE project “Rights, Representation and the Poor” project, Adrián Gurza Lavalle and John Harriss, and the careful assistance of Graziela Castello, Georgina Blanco-Mancilla, and Caroline Martin. For their generous and insightful comments we wish to thank the indefatigable reviewers of Theory and Society, Marc Berenson, Judith Tendler, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Sanjay Reddy, David K. Leonard, Eduardo Marques, Anuradha Joshi, Mick Moore, Nardia Simpson, Andres Mejia Acosta, and Katie Young. Research for this article was generously supported by the Centre for the Future State at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and the UK Department for International Development (DFID).
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Appendix
Appendix
We justify the models reported in Tables 5 and 6 by examining: (a) fixed effect due to unobserved regional heterogeneity, (b) simultaneous causality or endogeneity (c) selection biases. As we believe the results in Tables 5 and 6 are intuitive, we are interested in verifying whether we can use these results to draw conclusions about tendencies of individuals to actively exercise their citizenship in various ways.
Fixed effect model
The data set from each city can be thought of as a set of information for a panel of individuals from different regions: districts in the case of São Paulo and electoral zones in case of Mexico. These districts could impose unobserved effects in a homogenous way on individual behavior within a particular region. We tested this by running a fixed effect model for the regions of the cities. Any regional effect would most likely be correlated with individual characteristics; therefore, we tested for regional fixed effect. The results indicated that spatial fixed effects do not have an effect on active citizenship.
Endogeneity
We use instrumental variables that can explain associational participation and also are independent of proclivity to be an active citizen. We do not rely on theoretical justification for the chosen instrumental variables. Table 7 reports the test to justify the models in this regard for São Paulo.
The standard probit entries in Table 7 (columns 1 and 2) differ from each other because the second specification has an additional variable for labor market insertion. The corresponding IV estimates are compared (column 1 with 4 and column 2 with 5) through a seemingly unrelated estimation technique available in STATA-9 (2005) as a suest command. In both specifications we note that the null hypothesis of non-endogeneity cannot be rejected. That is, endogeneity is not likely to have a significant effect. We note, however, the result is not entirely robust. For some specifications we reject the null hypotheses. Thus endogeneity cannot be completely ruled out in the case of São Paulo. Similar tests were carried for the Mexican data. Our model for associationalims is weaker than that for Brazil. For Mexico City we can rule out the possibility of endogeneity stemming from the possible dual causality of citizen activism inducing participation in associations more strongly than we can for São Paulo. We do not report these results in this version of the article.Footnote 45
Selection bias
Suppose that associational participation does not contribute to active citizenship but other characteristics do contribute. Suppose further that these other characteristics, even if unobservable, are highly correlated with some observable characteristics relevant to associational participation. In that case, associational participation is irrelevant to active citizenship. Then, on average, a member from the treated group should be an active citizen in the same way as a member from the control group when both have these other observable characteristics.
To see this more clearly, one can construct two sub-groups of individuals from, respectively, the ones with associationalism and, ones without associationalism—by selecting individuals for each of the two groups that have the same characteristics with regards to a set of variables. If the two groups, distinct only in regards to associational participation, have similar rates of citizen activity then associational participation does not contribute to active citizenship. We use a method known as propensity score matching to proceed. Two groups are deemed similar in this context if they have the same proclivity to participate in associational activities, no matter if they actually had or had not participated in associations in our sample. The proclivity is based on a probit using certain characteristics following Rosenbaum and Rubin (1985). We then use standard methods to pair the control and treated groups by this proclivity (or score), (as described in Dehejia and Wahba 2002), to obtain two sets of samples—a group that actually had associational participation and one that did not. Both have similar observed characteristics; one can conjecture that non-observed factors are similar. We can show that subsets of our population, although with sufficient statistical power, are statistically similar, differing only with respect to their associationalism. They are matched to have similar propensity to acquire assocationalism, although some may not actually have acquired associationalism.
If the matched groups with and without associationalism are equally active then the associational effect on being active is essentially very small or negligible. We next show that the two groups within our data differ in likelihood of being active, despite the fact that they have similar characteristics. The difference in being active widens when comparing the matched groups.
In Table 8, the columns under the heading Unmatched report the proportions that are active citizens or that mobilize government in the population. The difference in proportions that make up active citizens for those with associational participation and those without is significant. This difference remains consistent throughout the two matching techniques we used. In each case the groups act differently. Thus we can confirm that there are no selection biases in associational participation influencing citizen activities. Similar results hold for Mexico City, but in Table 8 we only present the results for State-centric Practice. Again, the model for associational participation in Mexico City is weak.
No alternative models
What is the result of the various tests we have run to substantiate the models reported in Tables 5 and 6 in the text? Can we assert that associational participation results in increased active citizenship of various forms? The results for the endogeneity test show that the probit models are applicable even if for some specifications endogeneity cannot be ruled out. Our tests show that we can rule out selection bias, with the reservation that we do not have a strong explanation for associational participation in the case of Mexico City.
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Houtzager, P.P., Acharya, A.K. Associations, active citizenship, and the quality of democracy in Brazil and Mexico. Theor Soc 40, 1–36 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-010-9128-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-010-9128-y