Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Jalali, Carlos
• Lisi, Marco

Titel

The times (may) be a-changin’? The Portuguese party system in the twenty-first century

Ist Teil von

• Party System Change, the European Crisis and the State of Democracy, 2019, p.213-230

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• As the first third wave democracy, Portugal provides an interesting case when examining the party systems of third wave democracies. The Portuguese party system institutionalized rapidly. On the surface, Portugal appears to be remarkably stable, not least compared to other bailout countries. Voting behavior post-bailout closely approximated that in the pre-bailout elections of 2009, and considerably more so than the other bailout countries. Moreover, the government also appears to be “business as usual”, with formally a minority Socialist government taking office. However, this stability masks considerable change, with potentially far-reaching implications for the party system, not least the greater cooperation between the PS and the parties to its left. This chapter presents the electoral results and government formation patterns of the Portuguese party system in the twenty-first century. In particular, the twenty-first century saw the introduction of a number of issues that activated religious identities. The chapter demonstrates the Portuguese party system has remained largely resilient to the 2007–2008 economic crisis and the subsequent Eurozone debt crisis, even though the country was under an International Monetary Fund, European Union (EU) and European Central Bank bailout from 2011 to 2014. The economic and social impact of these conditionalities made them a very salient political issue, thus generating also considerable salience for the EU and European integration, given the central role of EU institutions and partners in the bailout. The Portuguese party system saw a relatively rapid closure of its structure of competition. The Portuguese party system is generally described as being weakly structured by the traditional cleavages of class, religion or region.