Citizens Profiles and their Propensity to Participation in Latin America

Abstract

In Latin America, citizen´s discontent with representative institutions has been shown by many scholars during last two decades. Latin American citizens express a general sentiment of disengagement and distrust from politics and politicians. This fact has re-launched the debate on the convenience of social participation in the policy-making process, beyond and complementing the electoral mechanism. Though, we do not know so much about the propensity of Latin American citizens to participate in public affairs. Which are the most frequents ways of social participation, and which are the factors that increase the probability of citizens to participate in collective actions (oriented to solve social problems), are the questions guiding this exploration. The analysis is run with public opinion data from Latinbarometer (2008).