Portuguese Citizens’ Support for Democracy: 40 Years after the Carnation Revolution

Abstract

Forty years after the Carnation Revolution, the relatively young Portuguese democracy is experiencing dramatically low levels of public specific support for democracy. This article tests the leverage of demand-side and supply-side accounts to explain differentials in public satisfaction with democracy. Through ordinary least squares regression analyses that draw on the unique data of the ‘Barometer 40 Years of Democracy in Portugal (2014)’, this articles shows that age cohort, identification with extreme parties, evaluation of the country’s political past, and economic performance are strong correlates of citizens’ specific support for democracy.

Keywords:

• Satisfaction with democracy
• Carnation Revolution
• political past
• economic performance
• Portugal

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editors of this journal and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. For very useful comments on an earlier version of this article, we thank the members of the Social and Political Attitudes Research Group at the Institute of Social Sciences – University of Lisbon, in particular, Pedro Magalhães, Goffredo Adinolfi and Marina Costa Lobo. This article was written in the framework of the ‘Barometer of the Quality of Democracy’ project, supported by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (strategic project no. UID/SOC/50,013/2013) and by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

Notes

1. For technical details of this survey see Lobo, Pinto and Magalhães (2016).

2. EuroBarometer, July 2014, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb81/eb81_anx_en.pdf (accessed July 2015).

3. Question wording is, ‘Could you please tell me how do you evaluate the following changes that Portugal underwent in the past years: do you consider them more positive than negative or more negative than positive: (a) increase in number of working women; (b) increase in number of unmarried couples living together; (c) increase in divorces; (d) increase in number of births outside marriage; (e) increase in the number of immigrants; and (f) decrease in number of children per couple.’

4. Question wording is, ‘On the following aspects, and compared with the situation before April 25, do you think things in Portugal are better, stayed the same or are worse?’ From the 16 items under evaluation the following 12 were chosen: economic situation, standard of living, health care, corruption, criminality and insecurity, unemployment, inequality between regions, inequality between rich and poor, education, housing, justice and social security.

5. The Cronbach’s alpha for these indexes are, respectively, 0.7, 0.7 and 0.8.

6. We arrived at a similar conclusion using left–right self-placement as an alternative variable: those who place themselves at the extreme left and at the extreme right are less satisfied with democracy than those closer to the centre.