Second-Order Elections and Electoral Cycles in Democratic Portugal

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationships between parliamentary, local and European voting behavior in Portugal during the democratic period, 1975-2002. First, the evolution of the party system and of aggregate levels of volatility (total and inter-bloc) are compared across different types of elections: legislative, local and European. At the individual level, the social and political anchors of partisanship are also compared across elections of different types. Second, theories on electoral cycles will be tested by comparing aggregate electoral results across parliamentary, local and European elections in different periods of the electoral cycle, using as the baseline the winners in each previous parliamentary election. The main conclusion is that relations between second-order and first-order elections reflect not only short term phenomena, with the former being used by the voters to express content/discontent in national governments, but also long term influences, namely in terms of party system format.