Satisfaction with democracy and confidence in political institutions are often linked to policy or ideological alignment between voters and elected officials. While policy congruence has been widely studied, less attention has been paid to process congruence—the gap between citizens’ preferences for representation and politicians’ perceptions of their duties. This paper uses data from three Portuguese election cycles (2005, 2011, and 2015) to examine how process congruence affects satisfaction with democracy. It also assesses whether political interest and educational attainment moderate this relationship, shaping the extent to which citizens respond to congruence between their own representational preferences and those of political elites. The results indicate that policy congruence is by far the strongest correlate of satisfaction with democracy. By comparison, the independent association of process congruence is small and not statistically robust: once policy and ideological congruence are accounted for, moving across the observed range of process congruence is not reliably related to satisfaction, and the estimates are inconsistent in direction across representative targets (i.e., whether congruence is measured in relation to all MPs, government MPs, or one’s preferred-party MPs). Citizens’ underlying representational preferences are nonetheless related to their satisfaction—those who favour a delegate style tend to be less satisfied than those who favour a trustee style. Contrary to expectations, this relationship is not stronger among the politically interested or the more educated; the limited moderation we detect—by education—runs opposite to expectations. Taken together, these findings caution against treating process congruence as a determinant of democratic satisfaction comparable to policy congruence, while suggesting that how citizens think representation should work is not irrelevant to how they evaluate democracy.

Puzzling many, Portugal has experienced a “permissiveness wave” on morality issues, despite its population’s high religiosity and the Portuguese Catholic Church’s (PCC) strength. The involvement of this institution in those debates is therefore crucial for understanding this puzzle. This study thus examines the intervention strategies (direct or indirect) and arguments (predominantly moral or rational) the PCC employed during the recent debates on euthanasia and gender identity by analyzing its publications on two institutional websites. Findings indicate that the PCC was active in both debates—particularly in critical political moments during the euthanasia debate—primarily deploying moral arguments and indirect strategies, but occasionally using rational claims and direct actions, like appeals to veto players. This substantial involvement—comparatively higher than in previous debates, given a more interventionist/conservative Patriarch—was nevertheless unable to halt permissive policy changes, mainly due to a secular parliamentary majority and lack of strong ties with political parties.

This article examines whether and how national media in Portugal, Spain, and Ireland converged in their interpretation of European economic issues during the Eurozone crisis. Building on research on the European Public Sphere, it analyses how national media located political authority, responsibility, and problem-solving capacity under conditions of intensified EU involvement in domestic economic governance. Conceptually, the article distinguishes between relational convergence, referring to cross-national similarity in media narratives, and directional convergence, capturing within-country shifts in narrative orientation along the national–EU axis. Empirically, the analysis draws on a comparative framing study of 6,070 economic news articles published in six quality newspapers between 2002 and 2015. Narrative interpretation across five framing dimensions—Problem, Cause, Responsibility, Consequences, and Solution—is operationalised through an original Convergence Index capturing the balance between EU-centred and nationally centred narratives. The findings show no generalised relational convergence following the onset of the crisis. Instead, cross-national dispersion in narrative orientation increases in the post-crisis period. Directional convergence towards EU-centred narratives occurs selectively: Spanish and Irish media display modest centripetal shifts, whereas Portuguese coverage follows a contrasting trajectory of systematic re-nationalisation. Overall, these results qualify crisis-driven expectations of communicative integration. While the Eurozone crisis intensified diagnostic and accountability-oriented framing across national media, it did not generate stable or cumulative convergence in narrative interpretation. Media convergence thus emerges as a differentiated and non-linear process, with important implications for how the communicative foundations of a European Public Sphere should be assessed under conditions of systemic stress.

This article examines the Companhia de Celulose do Ultramar Português (CCUP), founded in Angola in 1955, as a case study of late Portuguese colonial developmentalism. It argues that the company is best understood within the wider infrastructural formation that sustained it, linking eucalyptus plantations, railway transport, hydroelectric power, concessional land policy, and state-backed finance on Angola’s Central Plateau. Drawing on archival documentation and official company and banking reports, the article reconstructs the material, political, and institutional conditions that shaped the project between the mid-1950s and 1974. It shows that the CCUP’s projected competitiveness rested less on natural abundance than on a form of institutional fertility produced through inherited infrastructure, selective credit, politically structured energy prices, and the structural devaluation of African labour. Its history reveals how the very conditions that made late-colonial industry viable also imposed its structural limits.

Standard narratives of the emergence and consolidation of the Portuguese overseas empire stress the importance of decisions taken during the successive reigns of Dom João II (1481-95) and his cousin Dom Manuel (1495-1521). In this essay, I propose a different point of departure, namely one that stresses the frequently opportunistic character of Portuguese expansion. The central argument is that the Portuguese were not necessarily masters of the rhythms of their own empire. Their agency was heavily constrained by other historical actors and processes, particularly in the Islamic world, and the opportunities that these either created or closed off. Drawing on a large canvas of the transformation of European geopolitics after the death of Amir Timur in 1405, the emphasis would be on the complex struggle for hegemony in the Sunni inter-state system, especially between the Timurids, Mamluks and Ottomans, but also involving other polities such as the Aqquyunlu, the Muzaffarids (in Gujarat), and the Bahmanids (in the Deccan).

This study explores how secondary school English teachers in Portugal and Spain perceive extramural English (EE) and integrate it into English Language Teaching (ELT). EE involves any exposure to English outside the classroom, through watching videos, listening to music, or playing games – these being the activities identified by teachers in both countries as the most common among their students. The study analyzes teachers’ perspectives on the frequency of students’ exposure to EE activities, the impact of these activities on different language areas, and, more broadly, the relationship between EE and ELT. A total of 244 participants took part in the study. A survey was used as the research instrument. Data were analyzed by means of mixed ANOVA and an exploratory factor analysis. Findings showed that Portuguese teachers reported higher frequencies of student engagement in all EE activities compared to their Spanish counterparts. However, teachers from both countries shared similar perceptions of the impact of EE on language learning, and identified listening skills, informal language use, and the development of vocabulary as the areas most positively influenced by EE. Finally, teachers from both territories supported the integration of EE into ELT.

This article examines the formation of the first Luanda elites by exploring the trajectories of the members of the family configuration established by the matrimony formed by Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira in the early 1590s. By analyzing the evolution of the intricate web of interests that structured the Viloria family configuration between the 1590s and 1720s, the article probes how the early Luanda elites generated and mobilized social, economic, political, or symbolic resources that allowed them to establish ongoing partnerships with African, metropolitan, and Luso-Brazilian actors.

The Carnation Revolution in Portugal marked the transition from a dictatorial regime to democracy in the mid-1970s. As military and social forces took centre stage in the ‘Revolutionary Ongoing Process’, the establishment of a Western liberal democracy was accompanied by the country’s participation in a new international context. In parallel, growing citizen disaffection towards political institutions has become apparent, with attempts to expand democracy through multiple practices over the past two decades. Recognising the need to systematise knowledge on democratic innovations through a genetic approach, this paper critically discusses exemplary practices associated with emerging patterns of participation across three main historical stages. The main argument of this paper is that a situated understanding of democratic innovations allows us to view them as ‘children of their time’ that have contributed differently to the inclusionary character of Portuguese democracy, while demonstrating the capacity to incorporate lessons from the past.

This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010–2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face‐to‐face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monetary Fund and European Union official documents. The findings are compared to the public discourse of Prime Ministers José Sócrates and Pedro Passos‐Coelho. It is shown that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bail‐out limited the executive's autonomy, they also made them stronger in relation to other domestic actors. The perceived need for ‘credibility’ in order to avoid a ‘negative’ reaction from the markets – later associated with the conditions of the bail‐out – concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favoured policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors’ bargaining powers. These strategies, it is argued, constitute a tactic of depoliticisation in which both the material constraints and the discourse used to frame them are employed to construct imperatives around a narrow selection of policy alternatives.

In this article, the non‐unanimous decisions of the Portuguese and Spanish Constitutional Tribunals for the periods 1989–2009 and 2000–2009 are analysed. It is shown that judicial dissent can be predicted moderately well on the basis of judicial ideal points along a single dimension. This dimension is equivalent to the left–right cleavage in both Portugal and Spain. The characteristics of the recovered dimension are demonstrated by analysing both the properties of the cases and the properties of the justices who decided them.