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This article presents a crucial test for the theory of party cues by investigating the association between the legislative positions of the Brazilian political party system in a government-opposition dimension and the governmental assessment made by their supporters. The context of the test is the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government (1995-2002), characterized by successive economic crises, which would tend to reduce the parties' influence over public opinion, in face of the traditional explanatory power of theories of economic voting and VP-functions. The results, based on multilevel models built upon seven surveys, suggest that party cues work even in a country like Brazil and in the adverse context chosen for this empirical test. The findings also indicate that party cues were stronger according to the media relevance of each political party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article analyses the application of the punishment-reward function to the popularity of the president and prime-minister in Portugal, in the winter of 2006. The theory of the economic voting holds that the institutional context of citizenship may make it difficult to assign responsibility for the government's economic performance. Contrary to what earlier works have suggested, this study shows that Portuguese semipresidentialism does not seem to place barriers in the way of the Portuguese punishing the government (and not the president) for adverse economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]