Incumbents, Opposition and International Lenders: Governing Portugal in Times of Crisis

Abstract

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, during which non-collaboration could have dramatic consequences, and also with a majority government, when such a choice does not have major political or policy implications. Moreover, it enables us to study the effect of an additional veto player (the so-called troika composed of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), which not only constrains both majority and opposition parties, but also gives political entrepreneurs a unique opportunity to push ahead with liberal measures – in this case, clearly in disagreement with the moderate and radical left programmes. Relying on quantitative data on the legislative behaviour of the parliamentary party groups in the period 1995–2012, and on qualitative process-tracking of the opposition's positions on key economic issues – such as the decision to vote against Prime Minister Sócrates' last austerity package after a series of approvals – this article aims to determine whether, and if yes how, the financial crisis has affected the behaviour of the Portuguese opposition parties in parliament, by examining and comparing their behaviour in hard and in normal times.

Keywords:

• parliamentary opposition
• government
• consensus
• economic crisis

Acknowledgements

This contribution is the result of a common work. Nonetheless, Elisabetta De Giorgi is particularly responsible for the first and fourth sections, Catherine Moury for the third and fifth, and João Pedro Ruivo for the second section.

Notes

1. The PSD (Social Democratic Party) and the CDS-PP (Democratic and Social Centre – People's Party) are centre-right parties belonging to the European Popular Party. Despite its brief drift to a populist Eurosceptic stance in the 1990s, the CDS has been ideologically closer to European Christian democracy.

2. The parliamentary left in Portugal is composed of three parties: the PCP (the Portuguese Communist Party), the PEV (the left Ecologist Party), and the BE (the Left Bloc, a libertarian left party). The PCP and the PEV usually join together in a pre-electoral coalition (CDU), but split up again in parliament.

3. This argument is clearly supported in Portugal, which had already experienced two financial crises that pushed the country into asking for international financial assistance from the IMF in 1978–79 and in 1983–85. Those interventions, like the current one, triggered political instability and early elections. In two of the three cases, the parliamentary opposition played a crucial role in the government's fall, while in 1983 the government resigned after controversies both within the PSD and with its coalition partner, the CDS. Interestingly, majority coalition governments represented the solution after each fall in order to ensure the legitimacy of the hard policy packages to be implemented under the IMF terms.

4. Face-to-face interviews with 25 former ministers and deputies, January 2013.

5. The Socialists' policy positions, as measured by the policy proposals contained in party manifestos (Volkens et al., 2011), have become closer to those of the parties on their right than on their left.

6. Here we are following Leston-Bandeira (2004).

7. For further details, see the category list of the Comparative Policy Agendas Project at http://www.comparativeagendas.org

8. The analysis was also run with a dummy measuring the effect of the dramatic increase in interest rates (January 2010), which did not have any additional impact on opposition behaviour.

9. For the PCP: after the crisis, the odds of voting yes rather than no decreased by 15 per cent (1–0.85). For the PEV, these odds decreased by 62 per cent (1–0.38).

Additional information

Note on Authors

Elisabetta De Giorgi* is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the FCSH-NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal

Catherine Moury is Assistant Professor at the FCSH-NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal, email: [email protected]

João Pedro Ruivo is currently a Researcher and PhD candidate in Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, FCSH-NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal, email: [email protected]