Associations and the Exercise of Democratic ... - Citizenship DRC

IDS WORKING PAPER 285Figure 4.1 Percentage of population that participated in secularassociationsQ: ‘Have you participated in any ________ during the last five years?' [Multiple responses]Note 1: São Paulo n= 1,292; Mexico City n=1,284Note 2: Territorial organisations include neighbourhood associations, cultural and sports clubs andminority groups; Workplace organisations include labour unions and other types of professionalassociations.4.2 Two patterns of civil relationsWe test our hypothesis that associational participation influences the nature of thecivil relation between citizens and government using a small set of dependentvariables. We operationalise active citizens as those individuals who, in the last fiveyears, have undertaken any activities to improve, in a public fashion, access to publicgoods necessary to enjoying citizenship rights and lesser legal entitlements in thefive issue domains described in Table 4.1, or in comparable domains. The types ofactivities that active citizens engage in are then used to construct the four types ofrelations defined above: direct, detached, brokered and contentious. Individuals canhave more than one type of relation to government. For these individuals wecreate the variable mixed relations.In the multivariate analysis in the next section we cannot use direct relations in thecase of Mexico City due to its low frequency, and we therefore created one finalvariable – mobilise government – which includes any individual who sought to accessgovernment, whether through direct, brokered or contentious relations, and excludesonly those who only had detached relations.In both cities a substantial share of the population has sought to effectuate someaspect of their citizenship by undertaking activities in the public sphere to addressconcerns, individual or collectively, in the last five years. In Mexico City, active citizens24