Into the 'Secret Garden' of Portuguese Politics: Parliamentary Candidate Selection in Portugal, 1976-2015

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Publication . Fernandes, Jorge; RIERA, PEDRO

Legislative committees are the workhorses of efficient parliaments. LaPolambora highlights that "if the national legislature is to be a significant political actor, then it must have specialized committees of limited membership and considerable scope" (1974:123). Together with political parties, committees offer the organizational arena to aggregate preferences, curb transaction costs and facililate information acquisition and dissemination (Strøm 1998). According to Sartori, committees are optimal decision-making bodies because they "shun majority rule, seek unanimous agreements via internal deferred payments, and adjust to the outer world, or incorporate its demands, via side payments" (1987 236).

2019Capítulo de livro

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Speechmaking and the Selectorate: Persuasion in Nonpreferential Electoral Systems

Publication . Fernandes, Jorge; Won, Miguel; Martins, Bruno

This article examines the extent to which legislators use legislative debates to engage in localism activities to cater to the interests of their selectorate in nonpreferential electoral systems. We define localism activities as the delivery of tangible and intangible benefits to a geographically confined constituency that is instrumental to legislators’ re-selection. Our primary argument is that legislators whose selectorate operates at the local level make more speeches with parochial references. Results show strong support for this assertion. Furthermore, we find that high district magnitude leads to higher levels of localism. We use a mixed-methods research design, combining an original data set of 60,000 debates in Portugal with qualitative evidence from elite interviews. We make a methodological innovation in the field of representation and legislative studies by using a Named Entity Recognition tool to analyze the debates.

2019Artigo científico

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Entidade financiadora

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Programa de financiamento

3599-PPCDT

Número da atribuição

PTDC/CPO-CPO/30296/2017