Political Representation and Citizenship in Portugal by Marco Lisi André Freire and Emmanouil Tsatsanis

Author:Marco Lisi, André Freire, and Emmanouil Tsatsanis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781793601162
Publisher: Lexington Books

Part 2

Parliamentary Representation before and after the Crisis

Chapter 5

Ideological and Policy Representation in Portugal before and after the Great Recession, 2008–20171

André Freire and Augusta Correia

Introduction

In a liberal and representative democracy, a fundamental assumption is that in order to have a proper democratic regime, public policies should reflect the ideological and policy preferences of at least a majority of the citizens.2 We expect, therefore, that there will be some congruence between voters and their representatives (MPs), government officials, etc. in terms of ideological and policy preferences, particularly when segmenting voter and MP groups by political parties. It is also to be expected that once elected the MPs will try to implement the electoral commitments they made to their voters. Both are conditions for congruence between the ideological and policy preferences of citizens and public policies, which thus are both conditions determining the quality of democracy.

This chapter will seek to discover just what changed in this respect following the 2015 general election and the change of government in terms of congruence on socioeconomic policy matters (issue or policy representation). There are three research questions that take into account what we know about these matters from previous research (left-wing parties being in closer alignment with their constituents on socioeconomic issues, right-wing parties less so, with this symmetrical situation also true on authoritarian-libertarian issues, where the right is in closer alignment with the voters). First, are there signs of greater congruence between voters and MPs on the left on socioeconomic issues? Are there signs of less congruence between voters and MPs on the right on socioeconomic issues? Overall, are there signs of any increase in the quality of democracy in terms of policy congruence? Here, because of space restrictions and data comparability over time, we will focus on socioeconomic topics.

Our second aim is to map ideological representation changes that took place before and after the Great Recession by using left-right self-placement among the voters and MPs to measure ideological congruence between them over time. The research questions are also threefold: first, are there signs of greater congruence between voters and MPs on left-right ideological identities? Are the catch-all parties—the Socialist Party (PS, Partido Socialista) and Social Democratic Party (PSD, Partido Social Democrata)—still more congruent than more ideological parties like the Left Bloc (BE, Bloco de Esquerda) and the Unitary Democratic Coalition (CDU, Coligação Democrática Unitária)3 than they were in 2008 (Belchior and Freire 2013)? Are there any signs, overall, of an improvement in the quality of democracy in terms of ideological congruence?

We analyze these issues using a set of voter and MP surveys conducted in 2008, 2012, and 2016, and a new technique for measuring the (relative) congruence between voters and MPs while considering full distributions of preferences (index of socioeconomic issues) and ideological identities (left-right self-placement) for both electors and MPs over time. This is a methodological innovation of this chapter in respect of existing literature on ideological and policy representation in Portugal and uses alternative measures for policy and ideological congruence (between

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