Associations & Citizenship – draft 12 Feb-06 PLSE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE Word count: 12,681 Associations and Citizenship: Identifying the Relationship in Contemporary Brazil and Mexico Peter P. Houtzager, Arnab Acharya, and Adrian Gurza Lavalle * Perhaps nothing underlines better the deprivation of rights of the poor and vulnerable than when they interact with the [public] bureaucracies from which they must obtain work, or a work permit, or retirement benefits, or simply (but sometimes tragically) when they have to go to a hospital or police station….[where they face] the immense difficulty of obtaining what nominally is their right. Guillermo O’Donnell (2005: 11) This paper examines the contribution associations can make to citizenship, and thereby to the quality of democracy. Citizens in democracies have both political and civil relations to government, but the former has received most attention, particularly through studies of electoral behavior and/or political participation. We focus on the extent to which associations contribute to citizens’ civil relations to government, and thereby expand the scope of empirical work on the quality of democracy along the lines suggested by O’Donnell’s observation above. We examine how associational participation enhances the capacity of citizens, as agents who are carriers of a bundle or rights, to mobilize government action to address issues related to those rights or to public goods. The possible contribution associations make to great equality within democracies, by enhancing the civil relations of people caught at the bottom of different social hierarchies, receives particular attention. Studies of the relationship between associational life, or civil society, and citizenship are overwhelmingly case study based. 1 Efforts to generalize tend towards forms of ‘comparative anecdotalism,’ as idiosyncratic cases from different contexts are brought together in support of broad generalizations. In contrast to what occurs in small-N comparative analysis, these cases are rarely comparable. They are either not instances of * Peter P. Houtzager is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK; Arnab Acharya is a Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK; and Adrian Gurza Lavalle is professor in political science at Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC) and researcher at the Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP), Brazil. Graziela Castello and Georgina Blanco-Mancilla produced all the figures and provided invaluable research assistance. 1 Exceptions include Almond and Verba (1963), Verba, Nie, and Kim (1978), and some work based on opinion surveys such as the World Values Surveys. 1