Catherine Moury

Universidade NOVA de Lisboa | NOVA · Department of Political Studies

This paper analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis (2010-2015). To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, we triangulate different types of data: 1) face-to-face interviews; 2) investigations by journalists; and 3) IMF and EU offi...

In an age of rampant distrust and disaffection, pledge fulfilment is important for the quality of delegation between voters and elected officials. In this article, we make an empirical appraisal of pledge fulfilment in Portugal. Do Portuguese minority governments fulfil their pledges? How do they fulfil those pledges? What is the role of opposition...

Are political parties willing to partially forgo their office and policy goals to maximize their coalition governance capacities? Multiparty governments are plagued with preference heterogeneity and uncertainty about policy outcomes. In this article, we argue that parties choose to make a strategic allocation of portfolios to curb delegation perils...

What brings trade unions to ratify social pacts that retrocede workers’ rights? And what are the consequences of such actions? To address those questions, we embrace the ‘discursive institutionalist tradition’ (Schmidt 2002) that combines the analysis of the discursive production of reality with the analysis of the extra-discursive political events...

Between 2010 and 2019, five Eurozone governments in economic difficulty received assistance from international lenders on condition that certain policies specified in the Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) were implemented. To what extent were those conditions implemented? After conditionality, to what extent have governments rolled back changes purs...

In this article, we start from the assumption that the pharmaceutical industry accumulates material, instrumental, ideational and institutional power. Considering this, we expect that it would be very difficult for governments to reduce the rents of pharmaceutical companies in the long-term, even when the former are externally constrained to reduce...

Background In 2000, the Portuguese minority socialist government decriminalised the possession and consumption of drugs. This law made Portugal unique in having a formal system that directs the person using drugs to a panel under the purview of the Ministry of Health, as opposed to the Ministry of Justice, and hence constitutes an ‘Original Innova...

The Oxford Handbook of Portuguese Politics brings together the best scholars in the field offering an unrivalled coverage of the politics (broadly defined) of the country over the past 50 years. The Handbook includes eight sections. First, we look at the ‘Past and Present’ by making an overview of Portuguese political developments since democratiza...

In 2011, Portugal was one of the countries that were most dramatically hit by the emerging Eurozone crisis. As its cost of borrowing rose dramatically, the country faced both a political and an economic crisis, resulting in the fall of the government and in requesting a bailout. This bailout was conditional on Portugal undertaking public spending c...

In 2000, the minority Socialist government led by António Guterres decriminalised the possession and consumption of drugs. This law made Portugal unique in having a formal system that directs the drug user to a panel under the purview of the Ministry of Health, as opposed to the Justice Ministry, and hence constitutes a successful ‘Original Innovat...

To what extent Portuguese parties fulfil their electoral pledges? And does this fulfilment imply short or long term reforms? More: to what extent do veto players constrain the fulfilment of government mandates? This article focuses on these questions, analysing seven legislatures, from 1995 to 2919 and a total of 6367 pledges. The results show that...

In numerous areas of European Union (EU) policy-making, the European Parliament (EP) managed to expand its informal institutional rights through the use of bargaining strategies. We put forward a crucial, but largely overlooked bargaining strategy that the EP uses for its self-empowerment: By "moving first", the EP unilaterally interprets its forma...

A pandemia de COVID-19 chocou o mundo e demonstrou a relativa falta de planeamento dos governos para algo que vários peritos tinham alertado previamente. De facto, formular políticas de longo-prazo é politicamente custoso para os governantes porque os benefícios apenas são visíveis no futuro, apesar dos recursos terem de ser mobilizados no presente...

In the last decade, five Eurozone governments in economic difficulty received assistance from international lenders on condition that certain policies specified in the Memoranda of Understanding were implemented. What room of manoeuvre did the governments of these countries have? After conditionality, to what extent were governments willing and abl...

In this article, we argue that the Costa I Socialist government (2015–2019) managed to combine responsiveness to voters with responsibility towards domestic and international actors by pursuing some kind of ‘austerity by stealth’, which we define as less visible fiscal contraction that is not displayed by the government in its public discourse. The...

In the last decade, five Eurozone governments in economic difficulty received assistance from international lenders on condition that certain policies specified in the Memoranda of Understanding were implemented. What room of manoeuvre did the governments of these countries have? After conditionality, to what extent were governments willing and abl...

In the last decade, five Eurozone governments in economic difficulty received assistance from international lenders on condition that certain policies specified in the Memoranda of Understanding were implemented. What room of manoeuvre did the governments of these countries have? After conditionality, to what extent were governments willing and abl...

This book addresses those questions. It explores the constraints on national executives in the five bailed out countries of the Eurozone during and beyond the crisis (2008-2019). The book’s principal idea is that, despite international market pressure and creditors’ conditionality, governments had some room for manoeuvre during a bail out and were...

The publication pattern of EPSR confirms the findings of established scholarship on gender and publishing; women publish less than men (roughly, 30% to 70%). This gap reflects a previous submission gap; i.e., men submit even much more than women do. EPSR editorial process does not show signs of discrimination: single or leading female authors have...

This book analyses the European Parliament’s strategies of self-empowerment over time stretching across cases of new institutional prerogatives as well as substantive policy areas. It considers why and how the Parliament has managed to gain formal and informal powers in this wide variety of cases. The book provides a systematic and comparative anal...

This article aims to identify the resilience of measures adopted during bailout programmes, and the conditions under which decisions-makers reverse them. Focusing on Spain and Portugal (2014-2019), we calculated that almost half (46 per cent) of the most important measures adopted during the programmes were reversed in the five years following the...

This chapter develops the book’s theoretical argument and expectations for which we draw on rational choice institutionalism as well as sociological institutionalism. First, in Chapter 2.1, we identify reasons for the EP’s empowerment based on rationalist bargaining theories of institutional change. We assume that actors such as the EP seek to maxi...

In this chapter, we investigate the EP’s institutional role in economic governance during the Eurozone crisis and its aftermath. The Lisbon Treaty restricts the EP’s right to co-legislation in economic governance primarily to the area of multilateral surveillance. The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, however, coincided with the onset of the E...

In this chapter, we examine why and how the EP managed to expand its powers in the nomination and investiture of the European Commission from zero at the outset of European integration to a quasi-election of the Commission President using the Spitzenkandidaten procedure in 2014. This chapter provides evidence that the EP has been using a multitude...

In this chapter, we summarise and review the most important findings of the empirical case studies. We crystallise how in all of these cases the EP had considerable success in expanding its formal and informal powers by using its strategies skilfully. Furthermore, we systematically compare which strategies the EP used to widen its powers; how this...

This chapter examines the EP’s informal empowerment in the highly politicized area of EU trade agreements. In trade policy, the Lisbon Treaty granted the EP a major new right of ratification of international agreements falling under the common commercial policy. We analyse how the EP managed to significantly widen its powers beyond the final approv...

This chapter serves to explain how we assess our theoretical expectations empirically by relying on the congruence method in combination with process-tracing. Further, it specifies our methods of data collection. Moreover, we explain the book’s case selection rationale covering the EP’s institutional empowerment (or lack of it) over time and across...

This chapter analyses the EP’s success and failure in empowering itself in the budgetary process. The EP’s prerogatives in the budgetary process have increased significantly since the creation of the European Economic Community. However, this empowerment has been mostly informal and irregular: treaty provisions kept intact for more than thirty year...

This chapter examines the driving forces of the EP’s formal and informal institutional power gains in the EU’s legislative process. Over a period of around fifty years, the institutional rule went from giving the EP a merely consultative role in the legislative procedure to establishing it as a coequal legislator with the Council of Ministers under...

This article proposes a framework to understand and explain the occurrence of policy reversals. We argue that the occurrence and absence of policy reversals is shaped by the constraints of responsiveness (to voters) and responsibility (vis-à-vis creditors, international institutions and financial markets). We review the literature on reversals and...

Why are some parties more likely than others to keep the promises they made during previous election campaigns? This study provides the first comparative analysis that addresses this question with common definitions of pledges and fulfillment. We study the fulfillment of 18,743 pledges made in 54 election campaigns in 12 countries. We find high lev...

In this article, we shed light on the empowerment of executives resulting from the internationalisation of politics by showing how the latter allows ministers to use fallacies – i.e. arguments that seems correct but are not - in their coordinative discourse with domestic actors. In a first step, we combine literature from political science and argu...

This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010-2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face-to-face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monet...

In this article we analyze the evolution of the attitudes towards Europe of Portuguese parliamentary elites in the context of the sovereign debt crisis. Our anal-ysis relies on interviews to a total of 227 MPs in the context of the ENEC project in 2014 and of the Intune Project in 2009 and 2007. Our principal finding is that an important gap has ri...

A União Europeia ainda é uma democracia? Alguma vez o foi? As suas decisões são legítimas? Este livro aborda estas questões, procurando ajudar a compreender como funciona a UE e até que ponto a mesma é democrática. Argumento que a democracia europeia se aperfeiçoou, em grande parte graças à própria ambição do Parlamento Europeu pelo poder. Porém, a...

This report analyses the increasing role played by the European Parliament (EP) in the EU decision-making process. In the first part (Sections 2, 3, 4 and 5), it describes how the EP acquired more power in legislation, comitology, in the appointment of the European Commission and in the budgetary field. In the second part (Sections 6 and 7), the re...

Contributions to this study clearly support our initial hypotheses. It is observed, as expected, that the economic crisis has considerably decreased consensual behaviour in parliament. However, the nature of parties constitutes a crucial variable in order to explain the conduct of the opposition in the legislative arena better: since the outbreak o...

The Portuguese case provides a unique opportunity to study the opposition's behaviour in a variety of political conditions. It offers an insight into the impact of the financial crisis on the opposition's behaviour in both majority and minority political settings. It allows the comparison of the opposition's relationship with a minority government,...

This article explores the extent to which the economic crisis and political responses of the European Union (EU) to austerity policies have contributed to Euroscepticism in Greece and Portugal. We analyse attitudes towards the EU both at the voter and elite level using fresh and innovative data, and by comparing them with data from surveys conducte...

Since the onset of the economic crisis, parties in parliament (especially those in opposition) have found themselves faced with a dilemma: choosing between the need to cooperate with the government in order to overcome the crisis and the opportunity provided by a weakened government to stress their adversarial position so as to be more easily re-el...

Relying on data from the Euroba-rometer and the INTUNE project, the present paper studies the effects of the 2008 economic crisis on the support to the European Union, both among citizens and their representatives, in Greece, Portugal and Spain, and comparatively, in the remaining EU countries (EU27 or EU17). The paper discloses the fact that the f...

In April 2011, a caretaker Socialist government called in international lenders (the so-called troika, ECB, European Commission and IMF) to bail out Portugal. Following the elections, a centre-right coalition started to implement a serious of severe austerity measures and social reforms, allegedly on behalf of the troika, provoking significant rece...

In this article, we focus on manifest interparty conflict over policy issues and the role of coalition agreements in solving these conflicts. We present empirical findings on the characteristics of coalition agreements including deals over policy controversy and on inter-party conflict occurring during the lifetime of governments in Germany, Belgiu...

Which kind of decisions are passed by Cabinet in coalition governments? What motivates ministerial action? How much leeway do coalition parties give their governmental representatives? This book focuses on a comparative study of ministerial behaviour in Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. It discredits the assumption that ministers are 'po...

The article examines how changes of powers in the inter-institutional balance have affected the willingness of the Commission and the Council to delegate legislative power to comitology committees. Starting from the assumption that actors seek to maximize their institutional power in order to increase their influence over policy outcomes, we argue...

In this article, we compared and tried to explain deputies' and voters' perceptions about various dimensions of European integration. The general assertion that the political elite's perceptions tend to be more pro-integration finds some support in our analysis, but the results indicate this difference − in the Portuguese case − is smaller than has...

Italian party coalitions (from both the centre-left and the centre-right) have enacted an average of 57% of the pledges included in their common manifestos. In relative terms, Italian political parties keep their electoral promises much less than parties governing in single-party government, but slightly outperform those that form post-electoral co...

This article shows that, for the area of environmental policy, the Commission and the Council have been more willing to rely on extensive delegation after the introduction of co-decision. It also shows that the tendency of these two actors to delegate has followed the ratification of the Amsterdam Treaty – which indicates that the Council and Commi...

In coalition government, the relationship between parties and ministers is one of double delegation: from the party to the minister and from the coalition of parties to the individual minister. On the basis of principal—agent theory, I argue that a coalition agreement is a tool used by coalition parties to reduce agency loss when delegating to mini...

In this article, I look at the dialectic between parties and government to understand the extent to which ministers are bound by the coalition agreement. I first observe that considering the coalition agreement as a contract written by the parties for the government to avoid “agency losses” is an oversimplification. In almost all cases the main min...

In this article, I look at the dialectic between parties and government to understand the extent to which ministers are bound by the coalition agreement. I first observe that considering the coalition agreement as a contract written by the parties for the government to avoid "agency losses" is an oversimplification. In almost all cases the main min...

The impressive development of the European Parliament's powers over Commission appointment and investiture may be explained by looking at interstitial institutional change and its subsequent formalisation. The Parliament, since it is less sensitive to failure and has a longer time horizon, was able to create interstitial change to its benefit by it...

ElectoralchangeshavelefttheirmarkinthecoalitionpoliticsofBelgiumandthe Netherlands. In the late 1960s, the lines of loyalty between parties andvoters started to unravel, and the tension in government coalitions betweencooperationandconflictbecamemoremanifest(Andeweg,1988;Deschouwer,1994). Electoral competition fed mistrust, and conflicts between co...

Fuzzy Sets to get a clearer view: decoding the features of coalition agreements in Western Europe This contribution seeks to understand why the completeness and preciseness of the coalition agreement varies in four European countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and France). Fuzzy sets are considered as the appropriate method in an exploratory...

Abstract will be provided by author.

The program-to-policy linkage refers to the level of congruence between what political parties promise during election campaigns, as set out in their election programs, and the policies delivered by governments after elections. The program-to-policy linkage is an important element of modern democratic theory. Moreover, institutionalist theories pre...