Pedro C. Magalhães

Disaffected democrats: Political attitudes and political action in Portugal

Three decades after the fall of the Portuguese authoritarian regime, support for democracy has become widespread among the mass public. However, similarities between Portugal and other more established democracies should not be overestimated. In most of the latter, several studies have found increasing political and civic activism on the part of pro-democratic and politically sophisticated citizens, who are nevertheless increasingly dissatisfied with democratic performance. However, the most prevalent and consequential attitudinal-behavioural syndrome in Portugal is less one of ‘democratic dissatisfaction’ than one of ‘democratic disaffection’, entailing low levels of political engagement and participation.

After the Bailout: Responsibility, Policy, and Valence in the Portuguese Legislative Election of June 2011

This article discusses the 2011 legislative election results in Portugal and the context in which they took place. After describing how the economic and financial crisis unfolded, leading to the European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout, it analyses the campaign strategies of the major parties. On the basis of a post-election survey, the article then discusses how successful these strategies were, and concludes by analysing the aftermath of the election in terms of government formation.

Introduction – Financial Crisis, Austerity, and Electoral Politics

We are pleased to present this issue of JEPOP which is a special issue on the topic of how the financial crisis in Europe has changed the electoral politics of some of the most deeply affected countries. We are delighted to welcome on board Pedro C. Magalhaes as guest co-editor for this issue. Pedro is principal researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and one of the coordinators of the Portuguese Election Study. Pedro is not only the author of one of the articles in this issue but has been instrumental in recruiting the other authors whose work is included, and who originally delivered early versions of these articles at a conference organised by the Department of Government and the BMW Center for German and European Studies of Georgetown University. All articles in this issue have been through JEPOP’s rigorous reviewing process and we would like to thank our two referees, Professor Jack Vowles and Professor Sara Hobolt (who waive their anonymity). Ed Fieldhouse, Mark Franklin and Rachel Gibson

Implementing the World Mental Health Survey Initiative in Portugal - rationale, design and fieldwork procedures.

BackgroundThe World Mental Health Survey Initiative was designed to evaluate the prevalence, the correlates, the impact and the treatment patterns of mental disorders. This paper describes the rationale and the methodological details regarding the implementation of the survey in Portugal, a country that still lacks representative epidemiological data about psychiatric disorders.MethodsThe World Mental Health Survey is a cross-sectional study with a representative sample of the Portuguese population, aged 18 or older, based on official census information. The WMH-Composite International Diagnostic Interview, adapted to the Portuguese language by a group of bilingual experts, was used to evaluate the mental health status, disorder severity, impairment, use of services and treatment. Interviews were administered face-to-face at respondent’s dwellings, which were selected from a nationally representative multi-stage clustered area probability sample of households. The survey was administered using computer-assisted personal interview methods by trained lay interviewers. Data quality was strictly controlled in order to ensure the reliability and validity of the collected information.ResultsA total of 3,849 people completed the main survey, with 2,060 completing the long interview, with a response rate of 57.3%. Data cleaning was conducted in collaboration with the WMHSI Data Analysis Coordination Centre at the Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School. Collected information will provide lifetime and 12-month mental disorders diagnoses, according to the International Classification of Diseases and to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.ConclusionsThe findings of this study could have a major influence in mental health care policy planning efforts over the next years, specially in a country that still has a significant level of unmet needs regarding mental health services organization, delivery of care and epidemiological research.

Sovereign Debt and Governance Failures: Portuguese Democracy and the Financial Crisis

International economic crises are critical periods for any political regime. The 2008 global financial crisis brought to the surface several weak spots in the institutional performance of various southern European democracies. Portugal was no exception. Government attempts to tackle its negative externalities through a series of austerity measures did not prove successful on various grounds. Poor scoring in the economy generated social unrest. This article tries to assess the reaction of the Portuguese citizenry to the symptoms of failure in economic governance, particularly in what concerns their attitudes vis-à-vis the political realm by using different survey data sets. The analysis reveals that the decline in economic performance and in quality of governance is clearly reflected in citizens’ rising discontent with the performance of democracy and suggests even negative spillover effects for regime support. The available data also suggest that any expectations that the economic crisis might have ignited in citizens’ engagement in political issues seem only partially fulfilled.

FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT AND HOME-COUNTRY POLITICAL RISK The Case of Brazil

This article looks into the factors that explain foreign direct investment (FDI) in Brazil by country of origin. We collected a sample of 180 countries with and without FDI in Brazil. We use multiple estimation techniques and controls to isolate the effect of country political risk on outward foreign direct investment and show that countries with lower levels of political risk undertake more FDI in Brazil, and that features of the policy environment of home countries drive the negative relationship between risk and FDI. Furthermore, we show that the aspect of the political and institutional environment that is most likely to drive this negative relation between risk and investment into Brazil is related to the effectiveness of national governments. Our findings broaden the understanding of the puzzling influence of political risk on FDI observed in previous studies, correct for sampling and selection biases, and have substantive implications for policy design to attract FDI.

Citizens and the European polity : mass attitudes towards the European and national polities

1. Introduction: Citizens and the European Polity 2. The Determinants of Democracy Satisfaction in Europe 3. Informal Political Engagement in Europe, 1975-2007 4. Ideological Polarisation: Different Worlds in East and West 5. Electoral Turnout at the National and European Levels 6. But Still it Does Not Move: Functional and Identity-Based Determinants of European Identity 7. Trust in the European Parliament: From Affective Heuristics to Rational Cueing 8. Support for European Integration 9. Europe A La Carte? Public Support for Policy Integration in an Enlarged European Union 10. Summary and Conclusions: Europe in Equilibrium - Unresponsive Inertia or Vibrant Resilience? Appendices Bibliography

What Are (Semi)Presidential Elections About? A Case Study of the Portuguese 2006 Elections

Abstract This article examines what has driven voters’ choices in the 2006 presidential election in Portugal. Electing a semipresidential head of state has often been treated either as a “popularity contest” or as a full‐fledged “first‐order” election, depending on the particular national political system in which those elections were studied. Using data from a panel survey conducted following the 2005 legislative and 2006 presidential elections, this article suggests that, in a “premier‐presidentialist” system such as Portugal – where presidents are neither the heads of the executive nor mere figureheads – voters are unlikely to be oblivious to the conventional partisan and ideological cues provided by campaigns, but also unlikely to see these elections as a mechanism with which to hold government accountable. Instead, patterns of defection from the government party seem to conform to theoretical expectations derived from the notion that presidential elections in such cases can be conceived as “less important”, but where parties and voters remain aware of the connections between what is at stake in different electoral arenas.

Economic Evaluations, Procedural Fairness, and Satisfaction with Democracy

Although public support for political authorities, institutions, and even regimes is affected by the delivery of positive economic outcomes, we know that judgments on authorities are also made on the basis of several other aspects that fall into the general theme of “procedural fairness.” So far, most of the literature examining satisfaction with democracy has, from this point of view, focused on the direct effects of both economic and procedural fairness indicators or evaluations. This study takes as its starting point a large number of studies in social psychology showing that procedural fairness moderates the effects of outcome favorability in the explanation of citizens’ reactions to authorities. It expands those findings to the macro-political level, using representative samples of European populations in twenty-nine countries. It reveals that the general depiction of satisfaction with the way democracies work in practice as a fundamentally “performance-driven attitude” needs to qualified: economic evaluations matter, but they do not matter in the same way in all contexts and for all people, with procedural fairness playing a relevant moderating role in this respect.

The Clarity of Policy Alternatives, Left–Right and the European Parliament Vote in 2004

Abstract The importance of the left–right divide for party choice is well established, both for legislative and European Parliament (EP) elections. However, the conditions under which left–right self‐placement becomes more or less important in explaining the vote in both legislative and EP elections are clearly understudied. The article uses the 2004 EP elections as a laboratory to understand if there are indeed systematic differences between political systems’ characteristics that might explain variation in terms of the strength of the relationship between left–right self‐placement and the vote. Using the survey data from the European Election Study 2004 (twenty‐one EU member states), the paper has two goals. First, to examine whether citizens’ left–right self‐placement has a different impact on the vote in different types of democratic regime, defined in terms of the contrast between consolidating and long‐established democracies. Secondly, to examine whether this contrast resists the introduction of controls for three other factors hypothesized to make a difference in the extent to which left–right orientations have a greater influence on the vote: the permissiveness of electoral system; the clarity of policy alternatives provided by the party system; and the particular type of party alignments along both the left–right and anti‐/pro‐integration scales that tend to characterize each country. Our findings corroborate that (the 2004 EP) elections do seem to be about choosing parties in terms of left–right orientations to a considerable extent. Furthermore, we found that the usefulness of left–right orientations as cues to the vote seems to be contingent upon a major contextual factor: greater levels of clarity of the policy alternatives provided by the party system render citizens’ left–right self‐placement more consequential for their EP vote. Finally, we found that left–right orientations may not be equally useful in consolidating and in the remaining established democracies.