Citizenship and participation: limitations and opportunities for political participation of the urban poor in Chile.

Abstract

This article focuses different patterns of political participation of the urban poor in Chile, linked to some aspects of social and political citizenship. First, as a result of a factorial analysis, we can differ between several patterns of political participation: protest-oriented, orientation to political parties, local orientation, orientation to trade unions, and electoral orientation. Second, we defined responsible citizenship as a kind of relation between State and civil society which is characterized by individual democratic values and a disposition to invest energy in self-help activities to solve collective problems. Although in Chile the formalized participation in trade unions and political parties of the urban poor diminished, our results suggest that the local orientation (participation in self-help groups) and the protest orientation maintain high levels of involvement and correspond to some degree to what we called responsible citizenship. Thus, the local level became the space in which the references of poor citizens to the social citizenship keep intact, a kind of citizenship that was formerly eliminated by the ‘neoliberal revolution’ of the Chilean authoritarian regime.