This article examines democratic practice after the revolution that brought an end to authoritarian dictatorship in Portugal in April 1974, taking the Portuguese case as an opportunity to theorize democratic practice and historical processes that shape its emergence. The argument stresses the distinctive features of democracy born in social revolution and the explanatory role of the partial inversion of social hierarchies and remaking of cultural repertoires in social revolutionary settings. The Portuguese case is compared to its larger neighbor, Spain, which moved from authoritarianism to democracy at roughly the same time following a process of change thoroughly unlike that of Portugal. Comparisons with other instances of postrevolutionary democracy and implications for more conventional democratic systems are also introduced. A central theme concerns the extent to which democracies attain the ideal of full political equality among citizens. This article asserts that democracies born in social revolution may approximate that ideal for reasons rooted in their historical pathways to representative government.
The historical clustering of the transitions to democracy of Spain, Portugal, and Greece—all having taken place in the mid-1970s—encourages scholars to search for common causes, patterns, and paths of development. But important differences remain between the cases. Analytical distinctions include the difference between state and regime, and the contrast between regime crises of failure and crises of historical obsolescence. These distinctions make it possible to delineate divergent causes, actors, trajectories, and outcomes for the three cases of redemocratization.
In this article, we show that large-scale macro-political change can powerfully condition how institutional practices shape individual cultural choice. We study the paired comparison of Portugal and Spain, two long-similar societies that moved from authoritarianism to democracy through divergent pathways in the 1970s. Data from the 2001 Eurobarometer indicate that while the cultural choices of persons born before democratic transition are comparable across the two cases, Portuguese youth born under democracy are substantially more omnivorous than their Spanish counterparts. We shed light on this puzzle through a structured, focused comparison. Our argument is that whereas revolution in Portugal overturned hierarchies in numerous social institutions and unleashed an ambitious program of cultural transformation, Spain's consensus-oriented transition was largely limited to remaking political institutions. We show that this macro-political divergence resulted in a key cross-case difference at the institutional level. Whereas pedagogical practices in Portugal encourage young people to adopt the post-canonical, anti-hierarchical orientation toward aesthetics constitutive of the omnivorous orientation, corresponding practices in Spain restrict omnivorousness by instilling a hierarchical, largely canonical attitude toward cultural works.
This article examines how dissimilar democratization scenarios in two historically important cases helped to shape a major societal outcome, that of unemployment levels. With an empirical focus on the neighboring countries of the Iberian Peninsula, the paper argues that Portugal's relative success and Spain's persistent failures in the provision of employment cannot be fully explained by the focus of some analysts on comparative labor costs, and that the Iberian countries' employment levels also rest on a set of factors connected in sometimes complex ways with the two societies' very different paths from authoritarianism to democracy in the 1970s. Factors emphasized include the degree of incorporation of women into the labor force, the availability of adequate financing for small and medium enterprises-and the impact of national financial systems and state policies on that intermediary outcome-and the extent to which the two countries' welfare states are employment friendly. Central to this article's argument is the claim that the divergence between these Third Wave pioneers in their democratization scenarios accounts for the dissimilar penetration into the Iberian cases of another global wave of the late twentieth century, that of market-centric economic liberalization.The highly dissimilar democratization scenarios of Spain and Portugal in the 1970s are widely understood to have initiated the ultimately worldwide turn to democracy of the late twentieth century, but in this essay I argue that differences between the two Iberian paths of political transformation also helped to produce strikingly divergent societal outcomes in the field of employment creation-and other important arenas. Although I focus here on but one outcome, that of labor market St Comp Int Dev (2010) 45:281-310
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.