Abstract
The Portuguese régime change from dictatorship to democracy, set in motion by the April 1974 military coup and finalized with the 1982 and 1989 constitutional amendments, offers clues for answering contested questions about transitions to democracy. Among those questions are the following: Are there socio-economic prerequisites for democracy? What conditions facilitate subordination of the military to the new democracy’s civilian authorities? Who are the parties to the agreement a democratic constitution represents? What is the relationship between market economy and democracy? What works best in new democracies: parliamentarism or presidentialism?
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Notes
David Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
On the First Republic see Douglas L. Wheeler, Republican Portugal: A Political History, 1910–1926 (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978);
R. A. H. Robinson, Contemporary Portugal. A History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979).
Lawrence S. Graham, The Portuguese Military and the State: Rethinking Transitions in Europe and Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993);
Paul Christopher Manuel, Uncertain Outcome. The Politics of the Portuguese Transition to Democracy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995);
Kenneth Maxwell, The Making of Portuguese Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Walter C. Opello Jr., Portugal: From Monarchy to Pluralist Democracy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991); Robinson, Contemporary Portugal;
Paul Christopher Manuel, “Portuguese Civil Society under Dictatorship and Democracy, 1910–1996,” in Perspectives on Political Science, vol. 27, no. 3 (1998): p. 142 ff.
Carlos Cunha, The Portuguese Communist Party’s Strategy for Power, 1921–1986 (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1992).
On the revolutionary period and subsequent reaction, see Nancy Bermeo, The Revolution within the Revolution. Workers’ Control in Rural Portugal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
Martin Kayman, Revolution and Counter Revolution in Portugal (London & Wolfeboro, NH: Merlin Press, 1987);
Phil Mailer, Portugal: The Impossible Revolution? (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1977);
Audrey Wise, Eyewitness in Revolutionary Portugal (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1975); Cunha, Portuguese Communist Party; Manuel, Uncertain Outcomes; Maxwell, Making of Portuguese Democracy; Opello, Portugal; Robinson, Contemporary Portugal.
On foreign support for one or the other of the main Portuguese protagonists, see the memoirs of the British Foreign Secretary: James Callahan, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1987). See also: Rainer Eisfeld, “Influencias Externas sobre a Revolução Portuguesa: O Papel da Europa Ocidental,” in Eduardo
de Sousa Ferreira & Walter C. Opello Jr., eds., Conflitos e Mudanças em Portugal, 1974–1984 (Lisbon: Editorial Teorema, 1985), p. 79–99.
Hugo Gil Ferreira & Michael W. Marshall, Portugal’s Revolution: Te n Years On (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 46.
Cesar Oliveira, “Transiçao e Consolidaçao da Democracia em Portugal,” in Pensamiento Iberoamericano, no. 14 (1988): p. 300; Maxwell, Making of Portuguese Democracy, p. 112–113. Be it noted that the PCP’s popularity has not increased in the intervening two decades. In the most recent parliamentary elections, held in 1995, the communists, in alliance with the Portuguese Greens, pulled less than 10 percent of the popular vote. See Agora’s Elections Around the World website, http://www.agora.stm.it/elections/election/country/pt.htm.
On the politics of Portuguese constitution-making, see the collection of essays in Kenneth R. Maxwell & Scott C. Monje, eds., Portugal: The Constitution and the Consolidation of Democracy, 1976–1989 (New York: Columbia University, Camoes Center Special Report No. 2, 1990).
On the political struggles between the two branches, see David Corkill, “The Political System and the Consolidation of Democracy in Portugal,” in Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 46, no. 4 (1993): p. 517–533;
David Corkill, “The Portuguese Presidential Election of 13 January 1991,” in West European Politics, vol. 14, no. 4 (1991): p. 185–192;
Francisco Pinto Balsemao, “The Constitution and Politics: Options for the Future,” in Kenneth Maxwell, ed., Portugal in the 1980s: Dilemmas of Democratic Consolidation (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 197–232;
Carlos Gaspar, “O Proceso Constitucional e a Estabilidade do Regime,” Analise Social, vol. XXV, no. 1–2 (1990): p. 9–29. Graham, Portuguese Military; Maxwell & Monje, Portugal: the Constitution; Oliveira, Tranciçao.
Samuel p. Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” in Journal of Democracy, vol. 2, no. 2 (1991): p. 12–34;
Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited,” in American Sociological Review, vol. 59, no. 1 (1994): p. 1–22;
Deane E. Neubauer, “Some Conditions of Democracy,” in American Political Science Review, vol. 61 (1967): p. 1002–1009; Walter F. Murphy, “Constitutional Democracy,” photocopy, 1996. The Murphy photocopy is the syllabus for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers, which he directed at Princeton University.
Giuseppe Di Palma, To Craft Democracies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Manuel, Uncertain Outcome, p. 3; Giulio Sapelli, Southern Europe since 1945. Tradition and Modernity in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey (London: Longman, 1995).
Joaquim Aguiar, “The Hidden Fluidity in an Ultra-Stable Party System,” in Ferreira & Opello, Conflitos e Mudanças, p. 101–127. See also Daniel Nataf, Democratization and Social Settlements. The Politics of Change in Contemporary Portugal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
Jon Elster, “The Necessity and Impossibility of Simultaneous Economic and Political Reform,” in Douglas Greenberg, Stanley N. Katz et alia, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy. Transitions in the Contemporary World (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 267–274.
For forceful arguments against presidentialism see: Juan Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” in Journal of Democracy, vol. 1, no. 1 (1990): p. 51–69;
Arturo Valenzuela, “The Crisis of Presidentialism,” in Journal of Democracy, vol. 4, no. 4 (1993): p. 3–16. Lipset, Social Requisites, doubts that the case for pres-identialism is all that strong.
Adam Przeworski et alia, “What Makes Democracy Endure?” in Journal of Democracy, vol. 7, no. 1 (1996): p. 39–55.
Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
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© 1999 Marco Rimanelli
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Cuzán, A.G. (1999). Democratic Transitions: The Portuguese Case. In: Rimanelli, M. (eds) Comparative Democratization and Peaceful Change in Single-Party-Dominant Countries. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312292676_4
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