Bringing the Past Back in: How Attitudes towards the Democratic Transition Influence the Portuguese Voter

This article analyses the way in which attitudes towards the transition to democracy explain party identification and ideology in Portugal. This question is important because the transition to democracy in Portugal was a turbulent process marked by a rupture with the past and institutional fluidity. It has also conditioned the main political parties’ relationships with the electorate and each other since 1974. I compare the same explanatory model results from two surveys, conducted in 2004 and 2014, respectively, to understand the extent to which perceptions about the transition help characterise the Portuguese voter over the last decade.

The Catholic Question in Contemporary Portuguese Civil Society: A Case of Muted Vibrancy? CES Papers - Open Forum #14, 2012

The ‘Catholic question’ in contemporary Portugal obliges us to consider whether Catholicism will remain a force in Portuguese associational life in the next century, or whether it faces a future of slow and steady decline. On the one hand, an overall statistical drop of church membership, and the lack of religious practice by almost half of self-identified Roman Catholics, suggests that the future of the Catholic Church in Portugal will probably be very different than the past. On the other hand, the church’s support for democratic processes, the important social services it provides, and its educational establishment, have certainly been a positive factor in Portuguese associational life, and helped the larger process of democratic-regime consolidation since the Carnation Revolution of 1974. This paper suggests that social scientists need to move beyond the lens normally applied to the question of Catholicism in contemporary Europe (i.e. it is a dying, anti-modern, anti-rational, conservative institution), and instead consider the complex interplay of its demographic challenges combined with the popular sources of its theological and spiritual strength, as well as its vital societal contributions, to assess whether or not it will remain a force in Portuguese associational life in the future.

A letter on the Texas question /

Published in the Democratic Review for September, 1844.

Rethinking the national question: Anti-statist discourses within the Kurdish national movement

Why and under what conditions have the Kurds become agents of change in the Middle East in terms of democratization? Why did the Kurds' role as democratic agents become particularly visible in the 1990s? How does the Kurdish movement's turn to democratic discourse affect the political systems of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria? What are the implications of the Kurds' adoption of "democratic discourse" for the transnational aspect of the Kurdish movement? Since the early 1990s, Kurdish national movements in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria have undergone important political and ideological transformations. As a result of the Kurds' growing role in shaping the debates on human rights and democratization in these four countries, the Kurdish national movement has acquired a dual character: an ethno-cultural struggle for the recognition of Kurdish identity, and a democratization movement that seeks to redefine the concepts of governance and citizenship in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The process transformation has affected relations between the Kurdish movements and their respective central governments in significant ways. On the basis of face-to-face interviews and archival research conducted in Turkey, Iraq and parts of Europe, the present work challenges the current narrative of Kurdish nationalism, which is predominantly drawn from a statist interpretation of Kurdish nationalist goals, and argues instead that the Kurdish question is no longer a problem of statelessness but a problem of democracy in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The main contributions of this work are three fold. First, the research unfolds the reasons behind the growing emphasis of the Kurdish movement on the concepts of democracy, human rights, and political participation, which started in the early 1990s. Second, the findings challenge the existing scholarship that explains Kurdish nationalism as a problem of statelessness and shifts the focus to the transformative potentials of the Kurdish national movement in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria through a comparative lens. Third, this work explores the complex transnational coordination and negotiations between the Kurdish movements across borders and explains the regional repercussions of this process.