
Pedro C. MagalhãesUniversity of Lisbon | UL · Institute of Social Sciences
Pedro C. Magalhães
PhD Political Science, Ohio State University
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188
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Introduction
Pedro C. Magalhães currently works at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. Pedro does research in Law and Courts, Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior and Comparative Politics.
Additional affiliations
June 2012 - present
September 1995 - June 1998
August 2011 - June 2012
Publications
Publications (188)
Why are rural voters more likely to support radical right parties? This paper examines the mechanisms behind the relationship between living in a rural area and supporting the Portuguese radical-right party Chega. Portugal's radical right is an interesting case study, not only because of its belated but very fast electoral growth but also because P...
Portugal in the 21st Century provides a thorough yet accessible picture of contemporary Portugal in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It examines and elucidates Portugal’s recent trajectory, its current position, and the main challenges it faces through an examination of the principal dimensions of cultural, economic, political, an...
Can governments make courts politically compliant without undermining public confidence in the judicial system? Many studies show a positive relationship between judicial independence and citizens' trust in courts. However, most of them have shown static cross-sectional correlations rather than actual effects of court curbing on trust. Factors such...
This chapter provides an overview of Portugal's recent historical trajectory, emphasizing pivotal moments such as the collapse of the Estado Novo dictatorship, European integration, and responses to global economic crises. It begins by examining the genetic imprints of the longest dictatorship in Western Europe and delving into the legacies of the...
Much of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight component...
This chapter focuses on the constitutions of European countries as well as on the mechanisms in place to interpret and enforce them. It starts by defining ‘constitution’. It then proceeds to a discussion about the role of courts and constitutional review of legislation. Focusing on centralized constitutional review, it describes the variety of powe...
Why are rural voters more likely to support radical right parties? This paper examines the relationship between living in a rural area and supporting the Portuguese radical-right party Chega. Portugal’s radical right is an interesting case study, not only because of its belated but very fast electoral growth but also because Portugal represents an...
Welfare chauvinism' (or 'welfare ethnocentrism,' when directed against native-born ethnic minorities) is a declination of nativism within the social policy domain and a common element of populist radical right discourse. Previous studies have shown that this rhetoric can influence how people perceive the deservingness and entitlement of certain gro...
Political parties increasingly rely on self-regulation to promote ethical standards in office. The adoption of ethics self-regulation and its ability to induce change is likely to be a function of the responses from politicians and voters. Without external enforcement mechanisms, compliance requires support from legislators. In turn, if voters perc...
Prior work shows that women are, on average, more risk averse than men. This evidence has been used to theorize about gender differences in elite behavior. However, whether differences in risk aversion hold among the subset of citizens willing to run for office remains an open question. We report a pre-registered experiment with parliamentary candi...
Support for democracy in the United States, once thought to be solid, has now been shown to be somewhat shaky. One of the most concerning aspects of this declining attachment to democracy is a marked age gap, with younger Americans less supportive of democracy than their older compatriots. Using age-period-cohort analysis of 12 national surveys col...
Representative democracy requires the consent of the governed. But what drives public support for government? This book provides the most comprehensive treatment of approval dynamics in the advanced democracies to date. Drawing on data from the Executive Approval Project (EAP), a cross-nationally comparable data set on leader popularity, authors ex...
This research note investigates how different sources of economic information affected citizens’ approval of the government in Portugal from 2001 to 2018. It compares the predictive power of the revised and most accurate data on GDP growth with other economic indicators that were available to the public at the time, such as the first estimates of r...
O Essencial da Política Portuguesa oferece ao leitor, comum ou especializado, uma panorâmica ímpar, actual e sistematizada, sobre Portugal e o seu sistema político. Originalmente publicado pela Oxford University Press, este volume reúne contributos dos melhores investigadores nacionais e internacionais, que abordam a democratização portuguesa desde...
How do people respond to different decision-making processes in high courts? One long-standing view suggests that citizens expect courts to be neutral arbiters of legal controversies. Although the relevance of such “myth of legality” has been challenged, we know very little about the relationship between the portrayals of the motives of courts and...
Corruption scandals and their investigation have been shown to undermine support not only for the allegedly involved public officials but also for political actors and institutions more generally. However, we know little about what happens when those investigations end up failing to result in punishments. Is citizens' trust in the legal authorities...
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...
This chapter examines patterns and trends in public support for political authorities and the democratic regime in Portugal, as well regarding political engagement over the last two decades. Past assessments of the Portuguese case, particularly those based on social-scientific survey data, suggested that high levels of dissatisfaction with politica...
Studies on perceptions of corruption have grown in recent years but are still struggling with several conceptual and measurement issues. This scoping review provides an analysis of the peer-reviewed literature on perception-based corruption. From a total of 1,374 articles surveyed, ninety ultimately met inclusion criteria. We found two main quantif...
We study how political elites and voters respond to intra-party reforms to promote transparency and ethical conduct. Evidence from a paired conjoint analysis from politicians and voters in Portugal and Spain.
The movement of personnel between roles in regulation, politics, and regulated industries is thought to affect the risks of politicization and industry capture of independent regulatory agencies. To test whether such movements are better explained by formal rules or by sector‐specific patterns, we employ an original dataset of the 152 appointees to...
Does ideological polarization undermine or strengthen people’s principled support for democracy? In this study, we suggest that different manifestations of ideological polarization have different implications in this respect. Using data from 11 surveys conducted with representative samples of the adult populations of a group of liberal democratic c...
This report offers several points for reflection with regard to a study on the Political Participation of Youth in Portugal for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, supported by five key components:
1. Secondary data from the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2019;
2. An original survey of the Portuguese population aged 15 and up;
3. Interviews of...
O Inquérito que agora se apresenta pretende oferecer um retrato da diversidade das práticas culturais em Portugal. Este estudo encomendado pela Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian ao Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS) tem como objetivo primeiro fornecer às instituições culturais uma grelha de leitura sobre os seus públicos, atuais e de futuro, e dar um c...
Issue
Italy, Spain, and Portugal's health systems are financed through general taxation, are generally free at the point of care, and provide universal health coverage. The three national health systems emerged in the late 1970s, in Italy as the result of the collapse of the previous social health insurance system and in Spain and Portugal as part...
Ineffective governance is known to weaken support for governments and leaders. However, it is less clear whether these effects spill over to the regime and erode support for the democratic system. This article returns to this classic question, now using time-series, cross-sectional data to test whether the effectiveness of governments in sustaining...
The results of the European Values Study (EVS: www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu) reflect the values, attitudes and opinions of citizens with regard to a variety of topics central to day-today life, such as family, religion, politics, and work. However, issues involving perceived well-being and happiness, morality, human migration, the role of the welfare...
This chapter focuses on the constitutions of European countries as well as on the mechanisms in place to interpret and enforce them. It starts by defining ‘constitution’. It then proceeds to a discussion about the role of courts and constitutional review of legislation. Focusing in particular on centralized constitutional review, it describes the v...
Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device most commonly added to majority rule in national is a quorum requirement. The two most common are the participation and the approval quora. Such rules are a response to three major concerns: the legitim...
Objective: Determining the existence of a relationship between judicial performance and citizens’ trust in the legal system.
Method: Cross‐classified multilevel models, using data from more than 20 European countries, 80 surveys, and 100,000 respondents, over a decade.
Results: The longer the time that lower courts take, on average, to dispose of...
The Great Recession and the Eurozone crisis are frequently treated as having led to a breakdown in democratic representation in Europe, as deeply constrained governments became unable to translate the preferences of citizenry into actual policy. However, after reviewing the available evidence, we find that the crisis seems to have contributed to in...
What executives are and what they do in democratic regimes should obviously be affected by public opinion. This occurs not only through the electoral process, but also through the influence that, in the interim, public attitudes exert on (re)election-minded politicians. But what drives public support for executives? This chapter focuses on four typ...
Mobilization efforts by parties and candidates during election campaigns tend to reach those who are more likely to vote in the first place. This is thought to be particularly consequential for turnout among the young. Harder and less cost-effective to reach, young adults are less mobilized and vote less often, creating a vicious circle of demobili...
How can democracies effectively represent citizens? The goal of this Handbook is to evaluate comprehensively how well the interests and preferences of mass publics become represented by institutions in liberal democracies. It first explores how the idea and institutions of liberal democracies were formed over centuries and became enshrined in Weste...
In this chapter, we discuss the judicial politics within the Spanish Constitutional Court from three main points of view. First, we discuss the origins and institutional design of the Court from a comparative perspective. Second, by making use of the standard approaches (attitudinal, strategic and legalist models of judicial behaviour), we examine...
This handbook examines Spanish politics and government since the transition to democracy. The volume studies the political history, institutional changes, bureaucratic decision-making, political behaviour, and foreign affairs of Spain. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes of democratic Spain and discusses the end of Span...
Two findings stand out in the literature on public attitudes vis-à-vis courts. The first is that judicial independence increases public trust. The second is that ‘to know courts is to love them’. In this study, these stylised facts are used as a starting point to ask three questions. First, is there also a role for judicial accountability in foster...
The 2019 Portuguese general elections have led to the formation of another minority government of the Socialist Party. Right-wing parties suffered a resounding defeat. The election had two key consequences. First, after four years of contract parliamentarism with an extreme-left party, the Socialists returned to their historical position of pivotal...
The available file presents only basic information about the database. To request access to the database, please go to <http://hdl.handle.net/10400.20/2086>. Database on corruption surveys has a completed collection and systematisation of all major survey questionnaires related to corruption and integrity available online. This DB has 3050 entries...
Government transparency has been discussed both as a way to decrease informational asymmetries between officeholders and citizens and as part of what makes for procedurally fair governance. These two different lines of argument generate predictions about how transparency should change voters’ reactions to economic and policy outcomes. First, under...
In this study, we investigate how socioeconomic status is related to people's commitment to liberal democracy. Based on sociological and psychological theories of social conflict and dominance, we argue that those who enjoy a more privileged position in the social hierarchy tend to develop stronger preferences for the existing social and political...
In this study, we investigate how socioeconomic status is related to people's commitment to liberal democracy. Based on sociological and psychological theories of social conflict and dominance, we argue that those who enjoy a more privileged position in the social hierarchy tend to develop stronger preferences for the existing social and political...
In 2015, for the first time in the history of Portuguese democracy, radical left parties relinquished their status as outsiders and lent their support to a Socialist Party cabinet. Defying the expectations of many, this government survived its first years. In fact, it did more than survive: while largely fulfilling the interparty agreements that or...
A vast literature in social and organizational psychology suggests that support for authorities is driven both by the outcomes they deliver to people and by the extent to which they employ fair decision making processes. Furthermore, some of that literature describes a process‐outcome interaction, through which the effect of outcome favorability is...
A vast literature in social and organizational psychology suggests that support for authorities is driven both by the outcomes they deliver to people and by the extent to which they employ fair decision-making processes. Furthermore, some of that literature describes a process-outcome interaction, through which the effect of outcome favorability is...
Economic performance is thought to be a powerful driver of incumbent electoral performance, and gdp growth and unem- ployment to be the “big two” factors involved. However, while in the 2011 elections, under a profound economic recession and growing unemployment, the Socialist incumbents lost about one-fourth of the electorate, the center-right coa...
The notion that domestic responses to financial crises are constrained in a way that limits the options available to national governments is not new. However, the European Parliamentary (EP) term that ended in 2014 was a period when this reality was brought home to European electorates with previously unseen potency. This study explores the implica...
The austerity policies pursued in several countries during the Eurozone crisis began to call attention to the role played by courts as relevant actors in the context of budgetary and financial stress. The case of the Portuguese Constitutional Court has often been singled out in national and international forums as one characterized by particularly...
Portugal initiated the third wave of democratization in 1974, after forty years of authoritarian regime. 1 The " rules of the game " which were agreed to in 1976 largely reflect the historical and political circumstances of that period, which was characterized by a strong presence of the military in the political life of the country, an ascendancy...
For the very first time in EU history, the 2014 EP elections provided citizens with
the opportunity to influence the nomination of the Commission President by
casting a vote for the main Europarties’ ‘lead candidates’. By subjecting the
position of the Commission President to an open political contest, many
experts have formulated the expectation t...
Citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy works in practice in their country seems to be driven by, among other factors, short-term economic performance. However, this effect seems to be unstable, and in some cases has even failed to be confirmed. This paper suggests a cause for that instability. It takes as its starting point a fundamental ins...
Although 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 democrac...
The notion that domestic responses to financial crises are constrained in a way that limits the options available to national governments is not new. However, the last term of the European Parliament was a period when this reality was brought home to European electorates with previously unseen potency. This study explores the implications of this f...
On the fortieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, it is pertinent to ask how Portuguese citizens understand their transition to democracy. In this article, some of the main findings concerning the meanings and legacies of 25 April 1974 are presented, drawing on the findings of two surveys focusing on Portuguese attitudes towards 25 April and...
Em 1974, depois do 25 de Abril, ocorreram mudanças profundas em Portugal. O regime democrático, instituído com a aprovação da Constituição em 1976, desenvolveu-se sustentado em políticas públicas que mudaram o país em setores como a educação, básica e secundária, a saúde, a segurança social, a ciência o ensino superior. Também na justiça, as mudanç...
As semi-presidentialism has become increasingly common in European democracies, so have the debates about the consequences of several of its political and institutional features. In particular, in those regimes, cohabitation between presidents and cabinets of different parties and cabinet dismissal powers on the part of presidents are thought to be...
Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT), DER funds through Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade - COMPETE" and by Portuguese national funds through FCT: project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-037268 (PEst-C/EGE/UI3182/2013)
"Voting in Old and New Democracies" examines voting behavior and its determinants based on 26 surveys from 18 countries on five continents between 1992 and 2008. It systematically analyzes the impact on voting choice of factors rooted in the currently dominant approaches to the study of electoral behavior, but adds to this analysis factors introduc...
Portugal initiated the third wave of democratization in 1974, after forty years of authoritarian regime. The " rules of the game " which were agreed to in 1976 largely reflect the historical and political circumstances of that period, which was characterized by a strong presence of the military in the political life of the country, an ascendancy of...
This book examines the domestic electoral consequences of the economic and financial crisis in Europe, particularly in those countries where the crisis manifested itself more devastatingly: the Southern European countries of Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, as well as Iceland and Ireland. On the surface, the electoral consequences of the crisis...
Termination is one of the most important moments in the government life cycle. Political science developed several accounts explaining why and how governments face early termination in European democracies (King et al. 1990; Strøm and Swindle 2002). Recently, Schleiter and Morgan-Jones (2009) made a strong case for the inclusion of the Head of Stat...
What does "democracy" mean to people? Do different individuals hold different views about what democracy is or should be? What explains those differences? This article looks into these questions and gives an account of the sources and explanations of different understandings of democracy among Europeans. We advance a basic and simple argument. Indi...
Cleavage-voting" – the extent to which voters' membership in stable social groups leads them to choose parties that are politically aligned with those groups – seems to have experienced a significant decline in Western democracies, which has been generically linked to several consequences of social modernization. However, this emphasis on the searc...
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...
This article discusses the basic patterns of voting behaviour in the most recent elections in Portugal. These elections were fought under one of the most profound economic crises in the country's four decades of democracy, after a bailout agreement with the EU and the IMF, and under an unusually high level of campaign polarization around the issues...
Sabemos, de muitos estudos anteriores, que os portugueses não estão particularmente satisfeitos com a maneira como funciona a nossa democracia. Mas «democracia» é um conceito e uma realidade multidimensional. Dela esperamos que represente a diversidade de preferências das pessoas, que faça cumprir as leis e dê acesso à justiça, que responsabilize q...
The 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 p...
In most instances of collective decision-making, it cannot be expected that all persons who are entitled to vote will end up doing so. This has led institutional designers, out of concerns with the “legitimacy” of decisions, to introduce quorum requirements. A prominent example of this can be found in the context of direct democracy mechanisms, suc...
Diffuse support for democracy, as captured in mass surveys, tends to be treated as impervious to regime performance. Such a finding is often presented as confirmation of the basic distinction between ‘diffuse’ and ‘specific’ support as proposed by David Easton. This study argues that this line of argument stems from an incomplete reading of importa...
We take a new look at electoral sectionalism and dynamic nationalization in presidential elections. We treat this problem as one of synchronism of electoral cycles, which we estimate by using wavelets. After providing a self-contained introduction to wavelet analysis, we use it to assess the degree and the dynamics of electoral synchronization in t...
O livro “Portugal Social de A a Z” discute a sociedade portuguesa contemporânea. “O que tem sido, o que pode ser e o que quer ser”.
This chapter starts by describing the features of domestic, national-level and European Union-level politics that the previous chapters have sought to illuminate. It then summarizes the fundamental Europe-wide trends that have been observed in recent decades concerning the basic attitudinal and behavioural phenomena analysed in the previous chapter...
This article introduces a discussion on defining, measuring, and assessing the quality of democracy. Providing a short overview of the papers of the Symposium, it places them within a broader context of current academic debate on various methodological, theoretical, and policy outreach dimensions of the topic.
Entrevistas a empresas, advogados, juízes e entidades representativas do setor sobre os problemas e desafios da justiça económica em Portugal. Este volume apresenta uma divisão por temas: i) metodologia, seleção do entrevistados e métodos de análise; ii) problemas gerais da justiça; iii) ações em tribunal; iv) recuperação do IVA; v) ação declarativ...
The behavior of the individual Spanish voter has come to be rather well-understood, thanks to a growing body of literature. However, no models have appeared to explain or forecast national election outcomes. This gap in the research contrasts sharply with the extensive election forecasting work done in other leading Western democracies. Here, we fi...
This book provides a broad overview of the main trends in mass attitudes towards domestic politics and European integration from the 1970s until today. Particularly in the last two decades, the 'end of the permissive consensus' around European integration has forced analysts to place public opinion at the centre of their concerns. The book faces th...
This paper focuses on citizens' attitudes towards the transfer of policy prerogatives from the national government to European institutions on specific domains. We approach this issue from two different perspectives. First, using a cross-sectional analysis of Eurobarometer and Candidate Eurobarometer data on all EU27 member states, we tests hypothe...
This chapter presents the volume, its fundamental motivation, and contents. It argues that the end of 'permissive consensus' and the entry of mass publics as relevant actors in the dynamics of European integration require a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of how attitudes towards domestic and European politics are linked, especially in the c...
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 a...
This chapter discusses our third dimension of EU citizenship - Scope of Government. It analyses people's perceptions of and expectations for current and further EU policymaking capacity. It argues that Scope captures mainly a political, prospective and inputoriented dimension of citizenship. Accordingly, instrumental rationality - perceptions of th...
Spectral analysis and ARMA models have been the most common weapons of choice for the detection of cycles in political time series. Controversies about cycles, however, tend to revolve around an issue that both techniques are badly equipped to address: the possibility of irregular cycles without fixed periodicity throughout the entire time series....
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