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...

  Comparative Candidate Survey Portugal, national elections 2024, with Fieldwork and database preparation for FORS - Swiss Social Science Data Bank, 2024-2026.    This project is a member of the Comparative Candidate Survey https://www.comparativecandidates.org/    https://www.comparativecandidates.org/members?page=1   &   Member of the National Research Infrastructure APIS (with ESS, PNES, etc.), and of the European Research Infrastructure (in preparation): MDem – Monitoring Electoral Democracy:https://medem.eu/      

Comparative Candidate Survey Portugal, national elections 2022, with Fieldwork and database preparation for FORS - Swiss Social Science Data Bank, 2022-2024.  This project is a member of the Comparative Candidate Survey https://www.comparativecandidates.org/  https://www.comparativecandidates.org/members?page=1 & Member of the National Research Infrastructure APIS (with ESS, PNES, etc.), and of the European Research Infrastructure (in preparation): MDem – Monitoring Electoral Democracy: https://medem.eu/   

This research project is modelled on top of a large scale, pan-European project, called “EUANDI 2019”, in view of the European Parliamentary Elections of May 2019. EUANDI 2019 is coordinated by the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, in close cooperation with the University of Lucerne (Profs. Joachim Blatter, Alexander H. Trechsel and Dr. Diego Garzia). It builds on a larger research experience, starting in 2009, with the pan-European “EU Profiler” project (coordinated by Prof. Alexander H. Trechsel), followed by several national research projects (in Switzerland and Italy), as well as a second pan-European project, “EUANDI” in 2014 (jointly coordinated by Prof. Alexander H. Trechsel and Dr. Diego Garzia). The goal of EUANDI 2019 is to offer citizens of the European Union a Voting Advice Application (VAA) for the European Parliamentary Elections of May 2019.  This pan-European online VAA will allow citizens to take a stance on 22 political statements, covering numerous policy fields. Not only will they be able to indicate their agreement or disagreement with the proposed statements, such as “The legalization of same-sex marriages is a good thing”, but also to give personal weights to these items. An algorithm then compares their positions with the positions of the most important political parties running in the EP elections, providing the users with a personalised voting advice that shows their overlap with the political offer. As in the previous editions of the tool (the 2009 EU Profiler and the 2014 euandi platforms), EUANDI 2019 will also offer its users a transnational comparison of their political stances with parties from all the EU member states competing in these elections.   National team Portugal:  Frederico Ferreira da Silva (University of Lucerne) Joana Ramalho (Universidade Europeia) José Santana Pereira (CIES-IUL/ISCTE-IUL) Tiago Silva (ICS-ULisboa)

Roughly until the 2008 international financial and economic crisis and the sovereign debt crisis and austerity policies that followed, scholars studying the Southern European democracies (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) either focused on democratic consolidation or on the quality of democracy (see, for example, Morlino 1998; Gunter, Diamandouros and Phule 1995). However, the Southern European democracies have been experiencing profound changes since the emergence of the global economic and financial crises. As Matthijs (2014) noted, ‘there is already ample evidence that the strength of liberal democracy in Southern Europe has diminished since 2010, as seen in a weakening of civil and political rights, the rule of law and the functioning of government’. Clearly, there are significant changes in the functioning of contemporary democracies, especially those that haveendured painful austerity policies.The aim of this project is to examine these changes by analysing the case of Portugal, one of the countries affected most severely by the crisis, from both a longitudinal and a comparative perspective. Although it is still too early to definitely assess the impact of the economic crisis on the evolution of contemporary democracies, it is clear there are different responses to these external challenges and distinct trajectories of adaptation. Portugal can be considered a good example of one of the most important difficulties many contemporary democracies must face: the people’s loss of faith in the ability of democratic institutions — particularly legislatures, parties and the political elite — to solve problems and realise collective goals. We believe that by revisiting the concept of ‘democratic consolidation’ and by exploring aspects of a possible process of ‘democratic deconsolidation’ we can shed light on some of the changes recently experienced in European countries since the2008 crisis. The use of this concept here is not related to the consensus on the ‘rules of...