Communities, participation & politics: portuguese national report

Abstract

Writing a report on political and community participation based on our fieldwork data was not an easy task. We were not expecting to find very high levels of civic engagement beforehand, due the traditionally extremely low levels of political participation in Portugal – as will be discussed on Chapter 1 of this report. And such expectations were largely confirmed. Indeed, one the more noticeable reactions of households to the crisis was precisely a further retreat into the private sphere. In practice, this meant that references to political and civic engagement within our sample were scarce.