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Corruption scandals and their investigation have been shown to undermine support not only for the allegedly involved public officials but also for political actors and institutions more generally. However, we know little about what happens when those investigations end up failing to result in punishments. Is citizens' trust in the legal authorities in charge of prosecuting and punishing corruption also undermined? Do those effects spill over to political actors, institutions, and even the political regime? We address these questions by taking advantage of an April 2021 judicial decision to drop corruption charges against former Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates during the fieldwork of a public opinion survey. We show that the decision had a substantial negative impact on public trust in the courts. Furthermore, although political trust was not immediately affected, its overall levels also became lower in comparison to periods before the judicial decision, suggesting a spillover effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people respond to different decision-making processes in high courts? One long-standing view suggests that citizens expect courts to be neutral arbiters of legal controversies. Although the relevance of such "myth of legality" has been challenged, we know very little about the relationship between the portrayals of the motives of courts and justices and public attitudes in civil law countries. We explore this question in a pair of experiments in Norway and Portugal where we isolate the effects of different institutional frames from outcome favorability. We find that while partisan frames are detrimental to fairness perceptions and acceptance of decisions, depictions of judicial decision-making that emphasize policy goals do not adversely affect citizens' responses in comparison with legalistic frames. The results suggest that, even in civil law systems, preserving the myth of legality may not be a necessary condition to elicit public support for judicial decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International economic crises are critical periods for any political regime. The 2008 global financial crisis brought to the surface several weak spots in the institutional performance of various southern European democracies. Portugal was no exception. Government attempts to tackle its negative externalities through a series of austerity measures did not prove successful on various grounds. Poor scoring in the economy generated social unrest. This article tries to assess the reaction of the Portuguese citizenry to the symptoms of failure in economic governance, particularly in what concerns their attitudes vis-à-vis the political realm by using different survey data sets. The analysis reveals that the decline in economic performance and in quality of governance is clearly reflected in citizens’ rising discontent with the performance of democracy and suggests even negative spillover effects for regime support. The available data also suggest that any expectations that the economic crisis might have ignited in citizens’ engagement in political issues seem only partially fulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper approaches euroscepticism from the perspective of party positions and mass-level attitudes. It documents the nature and evolution of party euroscepticism from 1976 to 2005. Although the poles of party-based euroscepticism can be found, predictably, at the extremes of the party system, there is also a dynamic and contingent element to party positions that can only be accounted for on the basis of a strategic explanation. It also shows that, whenever parties attempted to mobilise voters on the basis of a eurosceptic discourse, voters responded to such attempts. Under those conditions, citizens' attitudes vis-a-vis the EC/EU, in terms of both the economic and the political consequences of integration, emerged as a relevant electoral cleavage in Portuguese politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]