The cooperation aims at expanding the institutional and scientific cooperation between Portugal and Brazil by stimulating the exchange of lecturers, researchers and students around expounding the problem and understanding of modes of political participation with an emphasis on forms of protest and institutionalized citizen participation in participatory budgeting processes in Portugal and Brazil.Specific objectives: 1) to identify tendencies and determinants of participation in protests and participatory budgeting processes; 2) to identify patterns of political engagement according to participant profiles (gender, age, race, socioeconomicand cultural factors); 3) to integrate the patterns of political interactions of the various forms into a general understanding of the national contexts and to changes in the models of citizen participation in occidental democracies.

This project has two main objectives:1)    Developing research projects aimed at comparing Portugal and Brazil's political systems. This includes the study of their political institutions, of the political attitudes and behaviors of their masses, and of the nexus between representatives and voters). These projects will both produce new data and make use of existing ones.2)    Promote academic training of graduate students (Masters and Doctoral students) of both ISCTE-IUL and IPOL-UnB by having them spend some time at both institutions. This exchange will allow graduate students to do short courses at either institution and receive advising from professor of ISCTE-IUL and IPOL-UnB. This project also promotes short visits of faculty at both institutions to present research results and provide specific graduate training.

This project is set to study the following questions: 1) What are the factors behind the growing dissatisfaction of the citizenry with the ruling class? 2) Is this dissatisfaction also addressed towards the institutions of representation? 3) How does the phenomenon of political representation function at the parliamentary level? 4) Does it make sense to speak of a ‘crisis of representation’? In order to answer these questions, the project will develop six strategies. First, it will update the existing databases containing biographical data of the Portuguese MPs (Freire 2001). Second, it will enlarge and deepen the existing knowledge regarding the role of the parties in the process of parliamentary recruitment (Freire 2001) through interviews with party leaders and MPs, as well as content analysis of party documents and press releases. Third, it will compare policy orientations of candidates (and MPs) vis-à-vis their voters (relying on surveys targeted at each of these groups). Remarkably, such a comparative analysis between elite and non-elite attitudes has never been done in Portugal, and it will allow the study of its political representation. Fourth, it will study the participation of civil society in the law-making process through an in-depth analysis of citizens’ and organized interests’ hearings in parliament. Fifth, based on a mass survey and on focus groups, it will study citizens’ attitudes towards the political elites and the institutions. Sixth, a crucial innovation of this project is its embeddedness into two international networks of research: the Candidate Survey and the PARENEL project (see references). Such a framework will allow us to insert our study in a broader comparative context and to relate the Parliament’s institutional characteristics to the whole process of political representation.

This project will involve the new problems associated with political and social participation, such as the rising trend in electoral abstention, political disaffection, the new forms of participation and the broadening of the democratic deliberation process. It will involve empirical EXPERIMENTATION in Portugal but we shall try to contextualize these questions within the European sphere, giving special attention to a comparison with Spain (an agreement exists with the researchers in CAES at Complutense University). Let us examine the different research lines: 1. The rising trend of electoral abstention in Portugal and other European countries. The explanations provided by the literature on the subject indicate the disappearance of political anchors (party and ?left/right? identities), the lack of interest in politics, growing individualism and, on the other hand, narrowing social and political divergences. It is useful to examine these explanations in depth, particularly the lack of interest in politics, and to explore others: globalization and withdrawal of the state from intervention, which has a tendency to neutralize the play in politics; the political parties? difficulties in transposing social problems to the political arena; and the way the parties themselves operate on an internal level and in their relations with the citizens and the media. It is also of interest to consider the cases of female political participation and the youth. 2. An analysis of the involvement of the agents in the voluntary associations and its democratic effects. The hypothesis to be tested: to ascertain if the different effects of association involvement (civic virtues, participative capacities, social trust, political integration) depend on the type of association in question. 3. An analysis of the change in political values and the implications: for the political behaviour of individuals and, possibly, the orientation of the parties. Have new security threats affected attitudes to...

Over the last decade the problem of participation in policies has taken on a new relevance in the European countries, largely due to the decrease in electoral participation and the tendency for citizens tl lose confidence in political institutions. This is the context within which we are submitting this research proposal, albeit from a perspective which involves comparative work at European level.

The project has the following main methodological objectives: to resolve methodological and statistical problems posed by integrating a regular survey of social attitudes in Portugal in the existing international networks; to accumulate longitudinal information on the population's perceptions of, and attitudes to, major issues in Portuguese society; to test the comparability of Portuguese data by using international and European questionnaires currently in use.