Exercising political citizenship in Portugal

Abstract

In this article, based on the results of a survey of the Portuguese population in 1997, the author endeavours to build a series of instruments to measure the effective exercise of political citizenship - identification with the choice of parties, associated participation and individual mobilisation - in order to assess the quality of democracy in Portugal. The lack of citizenship found is the result not only of the factors induced by the social stratification system but also of a generalised feeling of distance from the power, which, in turn, seems to go back to the oligarchic matrix of the country's political history in the last two centuries.