Civil society representation in the participatory budget and deliberative councils of Sao Paulo, Brazil

We examine the differential capacity of civil society organisations to represent the poor in institutional spaces for citizen participation in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The data was produced by a unique survey of civil society actors who work for, or with, sectors of the lower-middle class, the working class, and the urban poor. Contrary to the focus on autonomy in much of the work on civil society, we find support for the claim that collective actors with relations to institutional actors, and the Workers' Party and State actors in particular, have the highest propensity to participate. We also find support for the idea that the institutional design of participatory policy-making spaces has a significant impact on who participates, and that this impact varies by type of civil society actor. We therefore suggest a polity perspective on civil society organisations that, unlike the more common civil society perspective, is sensitive to the differential capacity for action and to institutional effects

Associations, active citizenship, and the quality of democracy in Brazil and Mexico

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-So 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"aEuro"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

DuPont and Environmental Defense Fund Co-Constructing a Risk Framework for Nanoscale Materials: an Occasion to Reflect on Interaction Processes in a Joint Inquiry

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