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The movement of personnel between roles in regulation, politics, and regulated industries is thought to affect the risks of politicization and industry capture of independent regulatory agencies. To test whether such movements are better explained by formal rules or by sector-specific patterns, we employ an original dataset of the 152 appointees to 11 IRAs in Portugal over the last 3 decades. We find that variations in the formal independence of agencies have been of little consequence. Instead, revolving doors abound in the financial sector, with a disproportionate share of regulators of that sector coming from, and moving back, to the industry. In turn, appointment of regulators with political links to Portuguese IRAs seems related with legacies of sectoral public control.

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.

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Supplemental Material, sj-docx-1-ppq-10.1177_1354068818797367 for New forms of mobilization, new people mobilized? Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems by Pedro C Magalhães, John H Aldrich and Rachel K Gibson in Party Politics

Government transparency has been discussed both as a way to decrease informational asymmetries between officeholders and citizens and as part of what makes for procedurally fair governance. These two different lines of argument generate predictions about how transparency should change voters’ reactions to economic and policy outcomes. First, under high transparency, voters should respond less positively to fiscal expansions. Second, they should become more sensitive to incumbents’ ability to deliver outcomes that generate benefits in the long-run than to current tangible benefits. We test these arguments using municipality level data in Portugal. Controlling for variables that previous research has shown to drive electoral support for incumbents in local elections, only in the least transparent municipalities is support positively related with increases in local current expenditures, budget deficits, and municipal wages. Instead, where transparency is higher, voters are more likely to reward improvements in the quality of education.

Supplemental Material, pp-2018-0008-File012 for New forms of mobilization, new people mobilized? Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems by Pedro C Magalhães, John H Aldrich, and Rachel K Gibson in Party Politics

In 2015, for the first time in the history of Portuguese democracy, radical left parties relinquished their status as outsiders and lent their support to a Socialist Party cabinet. Defying the expectations of many, this government survived its first years. In fact, it did more than survive: while largely fulfilling the interparty agreements that originated it, the government has presided over positive economic developments and even managed to abide by EU budgetary rules. How was this possible? We show that the political solution found, as well as the policies and practices that sustain it, involve a form of a ‘contract parliamentarism’. This solution has allowed the parties to the left of the Socialists to obtain policy benefits without compromising their core identity or significantly hindering the support of their constituents.

A tale of two elections: information, motivated reasoning, and the economy in the 2011 and 2015 Portuguese elections. Economic performance is thought to be a powerful driver of incumbent electoral performance, and GDP growth and unemployment to be the “big two” factors involved. However, while in the 2011 elections, under a profound economic recession and growing unemployment, the Socialist incumbents lost about one-fourth of the electorate, the center-right coalition experienced losses of similar magnitude in 2015 under a recovering economy and growing employment. Why has this happened? I explore three hypotheses: (1) the economy became a less salient issue in 2015; (2) responsibility for economic outcomes became more blurred in 2015; and (3) national economic evaluations were more contaminated by partisanship and affected by cognitive resources and personal economic experiences in 2015. Um conto de duas eleições: informação, raciocínio motivado e a economia nas eleições portuguesas de 2011 e 2015. Pensa-se que o desempenho da economia é um poderoso factor na explicação do desempenho eleitoral dos partidos do governo, e que o crescimento do PIB e o desemprego são os “dois grandes” factores envolvidos. No entanto, enquanto o Partido Socialista perdeu cerca de um quarto dos votos em 2011 sob uma profunda recessão económica e com o desemprego a crescer, a coligação de centro-direita sofreu perdas semelhantes em 2015 sob uma economia em recuperação e com crescimento do emprego. Por que razão sucedeu isto? Exploro três hipóteses: (1) a economia ter-se-á tornado um tema menos saliente para os eleitores em 2015; (2) a responsabilidade pelos resultados da economia ter-se-á tornado mais difusa em 2015; e (3) as avaliações da evolução da economia por parte dos eleitores foram mais contaminadas pela identificação partidária e mais afetadas pelos seus recursos cognitivos e experiências económicas pessoais em 2015.

What accounts for the instability of economic voting? Contextual factors assumed so far to affect this relationship include the degree of control over the economy exerted by governments, their partisan-ideological composition, or even voters’ experience with democratic elections. In this paper, we provide an alternative account. Based on a vast literature originating in social and organizational psychology, we propose the existence of a process-outcome interaction: short-term outcomes matter, but the weight voters assign to them depends on the extent to which governance is perceived to adhere to principles of procedural fairness. Based on data on twenty years of elections in the OECD countries, we show that the strength of the relationship between GDP growth and the share of the vote for the incumbent parties does depends on the perceived procedural fairness in governance. We conduct extensive robustness tests, including the use of alternative indicators of fairness and survey data., COMPETE 2020, Portugal 2020, FEDER, FCT, info:eu-repo/semantics/draft

As semi-presidentialism has become increasingly common in European democracies, so have the debates about the consequences of several of its political and institutional features. In particular, in those regimes, cohabitation between presidents and cabinets of different parties and cabinet dismissal powers on the part of presidents are thought to be a source of inter-branch conflict and government instability. However, so far, most empirical work on government survival has failed to confirm any of these expectations. This article addresses this disjuncture between theory and empirical results by making a twofold contribution. First, it takes into account the internal diversity within semi-presidentialism, modeling the implications for government survival of different configurations between presidential powers’ of cabinet dismissal, parliament dissolution and cohabitation in European semi-presidential systems. Second, it reconsiders traditional government survival using the competing risks framework by adding a distinction between two different types of non-electoral replacement: those where replacements imply a change in the party of the prime minister and those where they do not. Once such an approach is adopted, that presidential powers of parliamentary dissolution and cabinet dismissal indeed emerge as highly relevant for explaining government survival in these regimes.

Spectral analysis and ARMA models have been the most common weapons of choice for the detection of cycles in political time series. Controversies about cycles, however, tend to revolve around an issue that both techniques are badly equipped to address: the possibility of irregular cycles without fixed periodicity throughout the entire time series. This has led to two main consequences. On the one hand, proponents of cyclical theories have often dismissed established statistical techniques. On the other hand, proponents of established techniques have dismissed the possibility of cycles without fixed periodicity. Wavelets allow the detection of transient and coexisting cycles and structural breaks in periodicity. In this article, we present the tools of wavelet analysis and apply them to the study of two lingering puzzles in the political science literature: the existence of cycles in election returns in the United States and in the severity of major power wars., COMPETE, QREN, FEDER, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Spectral analysis and ARMA models have been the most established weapons of choice for the detection of cycles in time series data. However, such techniques are only appropriate when periodic components are time invariant. This has led some scholars to disregard the possibility of irregular cycles. We aim to contribute to further reconsideration of the possibility of cycles in political phenomena by introducing wavelet analysis. Its main contribution comes from the ability to estimate the spectral characteristics of a time series as a function of time, thus revealing how its different periodic components change over time, while preserving rigorous standards of statistical inference. We demonstrate the usefulness of wavelet analysis with two applications. The first concerns the possibility of long-cycles in wars, one of the central puzzles in the international relations sub-field. The second concerns election returns in presidential and congressional elections in the United States, where the existence of cyclical patterns has been equally controversial. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, wavelet analysis allows the detection of transient and coexisting cycles, shedding some light over phenomena that have remained unaddressed so far., Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Programa Operacional Ciência e Inovação 2010 (POCI 2010), Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER)

The role of national, sectional, state, and local forces in driving electoral outcomes in the United States has remained a matter of considerable indeterminacy in the American politics literature. In what concerns House elections, different approaches and methods have yielded widely divergent results. In what concerns presidential elections, considerable doubts remain about the timing and the plausible causes of a long-term trend towards homogeneity. In this paper, we take a new look at the nationalization of politics in the United States. We are particularly interested in the dynamic nationalization in presidential elections, i.e., the extent to which swings and shifts from one election to the next have been similar across states and whether or not that similarity has increased through time. We treat this problem as one of similarity or dissimilarity — and convergence or divergence of — electoral cycles, and use wavelets analysis in order to ascertain the degree to which the national and state election cycles have been synchronized and the degree to which that synchronization has increased or decreased. We determine, first, the states where electoral change has been more in sync with the national cycle and clusters of states defined in terms of the mutual synchronization of their own electoral cycles. Second, we analyze how the degree of synchronization of electoral cycles in the states has changed through time, answering questions as to when, to what extent, and where has the tendency towards a “universality of political trends” in presidential elections been more strongly felt. We present evidence strongly in favor of an increase in the dynamic nationalization of presidential elections taking place in the 1950s, showing that alternative interpretations concerning the historical turning point in this respect are not supported by empirical evidence., Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)