The emergence of a new dimension of political conflict has recently dominated the academic debate on cleavages. Political debate is evolving, and new issues are entering the political sphere and dominating the public agenda. Researchers have attempted to outline new approaches to political competition and focus on the reconfiguration of conflict around a new dimension, one orthogonal to the conventional left-right cleavage. Cultural issues, such as European integration, immigration, gender equality, minority rights, and environmental concerns, are enhancing the emergence of a new cleavage. This political realignment has been associated with the emergence of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in most industrialised countries. Against this backdrop, this project unveils whether and how the emergence and consolidation of PRRPs in Portugal and Spain relates to voters’ political realignment in terms of their preferences and perceptions. The two Iberian countries have been, for a long time, depicted as immune to the generalised emergence of populist radical right actors in Europe. Nonetheless, this exceptionalism came to an end when Vox and Chega entered mainstream politics in Spain and Portugal, respectively, in the late 2010s. Through an approach based on the demand side of politics, this project proposes a bottom-up investigation of the political preferences of Spanish and Portuguese citizens to assess the emergence of a cultural cleavage and its relationship with the emergence/consolidation of RPPRs. To attain this objective, this project employs a comparative research strategy based on the development of a large N online survey in the two countries. This survey includes a battery of questions on attitudes towards economic and cultural issues, as well as items on party identification and issue ownership. This questionnaire also includes a conjoint survey experiment. In this project, this methodological approach is crucial to unveil the main dimensions of political...

rregular migration represents a serious challenge worldwide. However, it is difficult to develop and monitor policies because relevant quantitative data are scarce and often outdated or contested. Many questions remain unanswered regarding the way that legal frameworks define migrant irregularity, the characteristics of irregular migrants concerning age, gender, nationality and other socioeconomic variables and the assessment of policies like regularisation. The EU-funded MIrreM project will assess the policies, data needs and estimates that define migrant irregularity in 11 EU Member States, the UK, Canada, US and five transit countries. The project will develop new and innovative methods for measuring irregular migration and 'regularisation scenarios' actively involving relevant stakeholders at every stage of this project.

In this project we seek to understand the variation in the activity of MPs and their performance as representatives in parliamentary systems. Our goal is to understand how representatives work in order to assess their performance in office. We are seeking explanations for the differences in activities which cannot be explained by educational attainment or experience. We aim to better understand how MPs work to represent their constituencies and where they rather serve the party. The importance of a functioning and stable parliament with MPs who are active and responsive to voters is one of the corner stones of the sixteenth of the UN Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda: “Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions”. Peaceful societies depend on  strong institutions where citizens voices are represented by their MPs. In political systems with strong parties, MPs face two principals - voters and the party. Thus, MPs will need to find ways to differentiate themselves from other MPs, for example, by co-sponsoring bills using the room for maneuver granted by parties (Calca/Koehler, 2021a; Calca/Koehler, 2021b; Calca, 2022). To study the way MPs use this space and assess their relative effectiveness, we will analyze co-sponsorship activities in Portugal and Ireland. The former is characterized by a closedlist electoral system, the latter by a single transferable vote system. They provide us with variation on electoral institutions and have strong parties. We use the institutional variation to adjust the Legislative Effectiveness Score developed for the US by Volden and Wiseman (2014), to be applicable in proportional systems. A novel approach and clear measurement model is used to re-conceptualize parts of the score. We call the revised score Legislative Effectivenes Score for Proportional Systems (LESPS). For the construction of the LESPS score, our main dependent variable, we collect both quantitative data on MPs’ co-sponsorship activities and media attentio...

The research plan seeks to address a major research question: what explains the intense salience of immigration in Western Europe throughout the 2010s? To address this question, this research plan proposed the development of two project proposals: a scientific project to present at the FCT call for research projects to study the politicization of immigration and the media effects on public attitudes towards immigration during the 2010s, and another research proposal focusing on political competition in social media to submit at the international level.   Drawing on the theoretical framework developed by Van der Brug et al. (2015), the first research project of this plan consists of assessing and explaining the level of politization of immigration in Western Europe during the 2010s. The selected case studies are: Austria, Britain, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland. This comparative project will focus on political claims, which includes any kind of purposive political demand, proposal or comment made by a collective group in the public sphere that affects the interests of the claimant or another particular group (Koopmans et al. 2005).  Politicization is conceived as being composed of two distinct dimensions: salience and polarization. The first corresponds to the number of political claims concerning immigration found in each article, which can contain more than one claim each. Based on agenda-setting literature, the number of identified claims made by collective actors indicates the overall importance of immigration in the domestic political agenda. Polarization refers to actors taking different political positions on immigration control and immigrant integration. Thus, an issue is politicized when it is both salient and polarized.   The research privileges the claims made by political actors in newspapers (including a quality and a tabloid newspaper) selected from a random sample of days between 2010 and 2020, whi...

A growing body of comparative political economy literature argues that western countries are increasingly dualised. According to this strand, the gap between workers is expanding. Some workers are covered by collective agreements, have standard contracts and have access to standard social protection, while others hold atypical contracts, have access to a second-tier welfare state and are not covered by collective agreements. This dualisation process results from labour legislation reforms that allowed the spread of atypical contracts; welfare state reforms, that allowed the creation of residual, income-tested, and in-work benefits for some individuals; and collective bargaining reforms that eroded collective bargaining coverage. The covid-19 pandemic has made even clearer the need to rethink these divisions, which are characterised by the existence of winners and losers. The guiding question of this project is: under which conditions can dualisation be overcome and solidarity fostered? The project focusses on one key dimension of dualisation: the regulation and use of atypical contracts, i.e. fixed-term contracts, self-employment and agency work. From our perspective, the type of contract is a key element of dualisation, and is of paramount importance to explain labour market inequalities and the disintegration of solidarity in the sphere of work. Thus, when speaking about reforms that foster solidarity, we mean inclusive reforms that improve the protection provided by atypical contracts. The main argument of the project is that fostering solidarity involves three levels of action: labour law (national), collective bargaining (meso and micro) and workplace-level arrangements (micro). Labour law plays a decisive role in establishing the conditions under which atypical contracts can be used. Collective agreements are important because they can define better (or worse) conditions than those established in the labour code regarding the use of atypical contracts. And it ...

  This research plan addresses the topics of the politics of international migration, the politics of integration of foreign citizens and their access to national citizenships, the impact of extreme right parties on their domestic political systems, the electoral inroads of the members of this party family, and the strategies of mainstream parties towards the extremist parties. These investigations will be mostly supported by the deployment of qualitative research strategies based upon qualitative comparative analysis drawing on small-N or single-case analysis. Cooperation at the international level will be developed to elaborate co-authored pieces of research and to set up multidisciplinary research teams to work on research projects. Lastly, the research plan aims to establish my profile as international specialist on the politics of international migration and extreme right parties, and thereby enhance the internationalisation of CIES-IUL.

The migration of workers, both geographically and in terms of occupational activities related to agriculture, is one of the largest transformations in this sector in the 20th century. The Portuguese countryside has been characterized by a high rate of depopulation, as well as by the aging of its population. At the same time, agriculture, the main economic activity in rural areas, observed a substantial decline in terms of preponderance in the labour market and in the national economy. The combination of the lack of manpower and the high levels of competition has encouraged a process of restructuring of the agricultural sector, betting heavily on internalization. The integration of foreign workers and the expansion of the demand for manpower in the Portuguese agricultural sector constitute a paradox, given the rural decline observed in the 20th century. This paradox serves as the starting point for this research project, which has four main dimensions: 1. Identify the characteristics, intensity and determinants of the demand for foreign labour in the agricultural sector in the Alentejo region; 2. Analyze the sociological and demographic profile and the expectations of the foreign workers in the labour market of the agricultural sector in the Alentejo region

Intelligence services have detected a growing Internet activism of the Portuguese Radical Right (PRR) associated with the emergence of two New Euro-American Radical Right (NEAR) streams: the North-American Alt-Right and the European Identitarianism. Both streams reveal a strong capacity to generate popular youth culture (media-activism, online militancy). The research project analyses the growth of this PRR propelled by the circulation and reproduction of NEAR ideas and practices. The aims are the following: 1) to explain the reproduction of NEAR ideas and practices in Portugal, both online and offline; 2) to map the Portuguese participation in the NEAR international networks; 3) to understand how deeply the NEAR is shaping the on-going developments of the PRR. Methodologically, the in-depth Portuguese case study will be compared with other successful and unsuccessful foreign cases to assess if and how the NEAR can turn the PRR into a more relevant right wing political player.

The project focuses on the migration of Nepalese to work red fruit agriculture in the south of Portugal and the relationship with trafficking for labor exploitation. It has two main objectives, i) the research of the experiences and ii) the contribution for actions of prevention and fight against the traffic. In order to do so, it initially intends to conduct interviews in the country of origin to  Nepalese immigrants before they leave Nepal and to those who have since returned from Portugal, as well as to the Nepalese immigrants in the country of destination (Portugal), in order to understand the specific role of recruitment companies and trafficking throughout the migratory process. The research will be published in two scientific papers. For the contribution of actions the team members intend to discuss with the different agents related with the Nepalese migration process (recruiters, managers of agricultural companies, municipalities, SEF, ACT, Human Trafficking Observatory, etc.) to create initiatives to prevent and combat trafficking in human beings for labor exploitation, as well as greater visibility and articulation for the activities already implemented, as it is the case of "New Generation of Local Security Contracts "in Serpa, Ministry of Internal Administration. The discussion of actions will focus on three points. Firstly, the way in which seasonal agricultural work can be regulated should be based on Directive 2014/36 - EU of 26/02/2014 on the entry of third country nationals into seasonal work, which is still to be transposed to Portugal. Secondly, initiatives for a greater participation of Nepalese in Portuguese language courses, already existing in municipalities in the south of Portugal (AA.VV. 2015), as one of the main resources of integration and qualification of immigrants. Thirdly, the translation of Portuguese labor legislation selected for English and Nepalese, to empower Nepalese workers and entrepreneurs of recruitment agencies.  Team: ...

This comparative research project entitled: Support and Opposition to Migration (SOM) in Portugal in a Comparative Perspective seeks to evaluate the politicisation of immigration and integration issues in Portugal through the employment of a comparative approach supported by the SOM international network (https://sites.google.com/site/somprojecteu/).

Immigration into Southern Europe in the twentieth-first century: still an exceptional ‘Eldorado’?