embracement, based on the first point, of attitudes and beliefs that are political and civic; and 3) the creation of strong opinions on public affairs.

Uslaner’s (2003) ideas on the mental process of engagement do not follow a chronological or linear order, but instead, several possible sources of engagement activation can be deduced from his approach, acting independently or together, and they are as follows:

Social, economic and political factors: “People with more resources are more likely to participate” (Uslaner, 2003: 2)

Personal motivation for a specific cause: The root of interest in “becoming involved in politics, for example, is very different from that of volunteering” (p. 1);

Confidence in one’s own ability to participate: “People who believe they can make a difference are those who are most involved in public life” (p. 3);

Trust2 and satisfaction with the system: trust, on the one hand, is one of the most well developed concepts in relation to engagement (Yang, 2005; Yang and Callaham, 2007; Van der Walle, Van Roosbroek and Bouckaert, 2008). Uslander (2003) considers that “people who follow politics and who believe the system will respond to them -they trust the system- are also more likely to get involved” (p. 3). Satisfaction, on the other hand, is associated with better levels of engagement in society, yet some authors warn that this “has been weakened in almost all democratic countries” (Benedict and Moran, 2003: 3).

Of the four reasons that help in understanding why people mobilize, three of them (a, b and c) are related to purely individual issues, while only the last involves issues in which Public Administration is able to intervene. In other words, for there to be a commitment by citizens, public administrators must pay special attention to the levels of trust and satisfaction that they engender in the public.

3.2. Expressions of Citizen Engagement

By the word expresion, we mean the form in which engagement manifests itself. Possibly the most studied term in relation to types of engagement is participation, so that citizens are considered to show indications of engagement when they participate. The relationship between the two concepts has been so well developed by some authors (Verba and Nie, 1972; Putnam, 1993, 1995, 2000; Brady, 1999; Adler and Goggin, 2005; Cooper, 2005; Teorel et. al, 2007; Ekman and Amna, 2012) that on many occasions they have blurred the nuances of both concepts and have proceeded to identify them as synonymous terms. The following are distinct expressions of engagement (Table 1): a) political or manifest actions; and b) public actions, also called latent participation.