Democracy and social development in portugal

The proposition that political democratization - in the case of Portugal, the historically unusual pathway to democracy that commenced on April 25, 1974 - punctuates and recalibrates developmental processes is well established in scholarly literature. Socio-economic development is often both a cause and in other ways a consequence of political democratization, with numerous divergent pathways of that articulation. (^{Przeworski et. al., 2000}; ^{Moore, 1966}; ^{Huber and Stephens, 2012}). There is some controversy among political scientists as to whether economic development makes it more likely that democracy will emerge or instead simply makes it more likely that once established it will endure, but whichever view one adopts it remains the case that economic development and democracy tend to be associated with one another at least to some degree, despite the existence of numerous complexities in that story. However, what is perhaps more crucially important for our consideration of the Portuguese case is that once established, democracy seems to shift, however partially, national trajectories of social development (Przeworski et al., 2000; Huber and Stephens, 2012). Despite certain limitations in the degree to which the formulation of public policies in some democracies genuinely and fully reflects underlying popular preferences (^{Achen and Bartels, 2016}), on balance, the emergence of democracy is typically followed by improvements in various social indicators and often by an ultimate decline in inequality.

Thus, democracy can be expected to lead to improvements in educational health and distributional outcomes and, for that reason, Portugal’s mid-1970s transition to democracy could be expected to lead to a variety of social changes within the country - providing social scientists with a great deal of material for their research. However, the empirical record of what has been achieved is on some measures even greater in magnitude than one would expect based on the average effects of democracy. Indeed, under democracy, it is possible to argue that the country has ceased being a problematic laggard and, on some matters, has become a “star of the south” (^{Fishman, 2022}) with a variety of outcomes that perhaps surprisingly set the case apart from others in southern Europe. Yet this record of some areas of extraordinary success coexists with other arenas of more disappointing performance. Elements of unevenness or dualism persist albeit in new ways.

Conceptualizing and studying portugal’s dualities

This assessment resonates with a central assertion in a long and distinguished lineage of scholarly work: Portugal’s development has long been characterized by scholars through reference to its patterns of unevenness or duality. Extending that insight in the literature, I emphasize in this essay how the nature of the country’s internal inconsistencies - and their placement in broader European and global dynamics of development - changed fundamentally in 1974. The evolution of Portugal, after the country’s historically exceptional revolutionary pathway from dictatorship to democracy, continued to be marked by elements of unevenness or “contradiction” but the outlines of those “dualities” were fundamentally transformed in, and as a result of, the country’s democratization through revolution. Thus, recent history presents the country’s students with a complex set of interrelated and more or less “uneven” developments that offer social scientists numerous challenges in their research. However, after 1974, the country’s new pattern of unevenness is increasingly marked by examples of considerable success that place Portugal above other south European cases on several significant matters - a considerable change from earlier days when Portugal was more likely to find itself in a less advantageous situation than other south European cases (^{Fishman, 2022}).

In the study of this totality of complex transformation, the collective work of the extraordinary group of scholars at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS), obviously also in collaboration with colleagues at other institutions, has been crucial. The ICS has provided a stimulating and supportive intellectual home to a multidisciplinary group of first-rate researchers whose work has shed great light on a very long list of important questions. Along with Portuguese social scientists based in other institutions, and a few foreigners who have devoted significant efforts to the study of Portugal (^{Wheeler, 1978}; ^{Makler, 1979}; ^{Bermeo, 1986}; ^{Schwartzman, 1989}; ^{Schmitter, 1999}), the ICS group has produced a remarkably rigorous and insightful body of findings on the country’s complex transformation both before and after democratization. The cumulative impact of those findings, and of the theoretical work associated with them, has been enormous, with large implications not only for our knowledge of modern Portugal but also for our broadly theoretical understanding of a number of large themes related to democracy, equality, gender relations, social inclusion, economic development, education and culture and related questions.

The intrinsic complexity of Portugal’s more or less uneven dynamics of transformation, and their broad character - covering many institutional terrains - accentuates the need for a great deal of high-quality empirical and conceptually oriented work, precisely the task to which ICS scholars have devoted themselves. That task is not only empirical: the broad pattern of complexity needs to be weighed and assessed in theoretical terms, assessing the significance of the case for broad cross-national comparisons and as a way to make sense of the transformations brought about by democratization. In this essay, I concentrate on both the effort to specify many central elements of Portugal’s transformations in recent decades and the objective of making theoretical sense of the overall configuration of transformation and its linkage to the country’s unusual pathway to democracy.

It should be said that uneven development is hardly a uniquely Portuguese phenomenon. Indeed, development that occurs in a homogeneous fashion throughout an entire country is probably virtually impossible except for micro-states. However, certain elements of Portugal’s dualities and record of unevenness in development have been either unusually pronounced or distinctive - especially if one takes a long view of history. And that distinctiveness is linked to theoretically significant features of the country’s political history, both before 1974 and then in new and different ways from that year onward. Portugal’s record of development holds broad comparative and theoretical importance for social scientists.

April 25 and the transformation of portuguese dualities

In my analysis, the key point in the overall empirical pattern presented by Portugal’s history of uneven development is a shift that took place soon after the April 25, 1974 beginning of the revolutionary route to democracy that began in the captains’ coup that initiated the Carnation Revolution. Up until that time, Portugal’s most characteristic dualities tended to involve a split between forms of development - such as rapid urbanization - found throughout most of southern Europe and elements of greater and continuing backwardness that remained more recalcitrant in Portugal than in most of southern Europe. The country was in comparative terms to some degree a laggard, even in the broader South European context, and the magnitude of its relative lag varied a great deal by area and of course also by social strata. Thus, for example, the continuing existence of illiteracy among a significant minority of the population set 1974 Portugal apart from most of southern Europe, a long historical shadow cast by the unusually late introduction of universal access to education only in the 1950s (^{Candeia et al., 2007}), significantly later than in other south European countries. Two fundamental indicators of economic development, per capita income and industrialization, remained substantially lower than in neighboring Spain, to say nothing of Italy, at the time of the Iberian Peninsula’s twin - and very different - transitions to democracy in the mid-1970s (^{Barreto et al., 2000}). Despite Portugal’s rapid economic growth during most of the 1960s and early 1970s, the country’s economic divergence from Western European averages remained quite large, and substantially more pronounced than that of its larger neighbor to the east, just prior to the revolutionary coup of April 25, 1974.

This pattern changed fundamentally as a complex result of the country’s historically exceptional pathway to democracy. Some transformations occurred quickly and dramatically whereas others developed slowly over time and to a large result as a consequence of long-acting institutional and cultural dynamics put in place by April 25 (^{Fishman, 2019}). Decades later, although in most respects Portugal maintained central features of broader south European patterns, on several crucially important indicators the country broke out of the southern European constellation and moved much closer to quite successful societies of northern Europe. This point is often underappreciated yet it is manifested in different ways. The much-followed PISA ranking of educational success at the high school level showed in its recent 2018 study that Portugal had become the most successful South European case in multiple indicators of student achievement. This accomplishment is especially noteworthy because, in broad-based measures of educational success, the country has clearly been sailing against strong “headwinds” linked to the long historical shadows cast by the late introduction of universal access to education in the 1950s. That historical lag in generalized access to basic education means that many Portuguese high school students have been educational pioneers within their own families and therefore cannot enjoy the opportunities for family tutoring that students from well-educated families may experience. This historically based deficit could be expected to produce a Portuguese disadvantage in comparison with other south European cases but the PISA data reveal exactly the reverse. Something about the post-April 25 experience has allowed Portugal to outperform its south European peers despite the structural disadvantage presented by the late introduction of universal access to education.

There is much more to be said about the broader record: Other indicators of Portugal’s breakout from general South European patterns include the prominence of “omnivore” cultural tastes (a key marker of cultural tolerance and sophistication) among Portuguese people born under democracy ( ^{Fishman and Lizardo, 2013}), certain important components of citizenship practice (^{Fishman and Cabral, 2016}), the crucial matter of the incorporation of women into the workforce (Fishman, 2010), and general levels of satisfaction with democracy, after 2015, as measured by the Eurobarometer data (^{Fishman, 2022}). On this varied and important set of indicators, Portugal now stands as more successful, or at least more similar to North European patterns, than the rest of southern Europe. Of course, on a variety of other matters Portugal continues to manifest features shared with other south European cases - and thus elements on which major problems or challenges persist. Portugal’s record of socio-political development continues to be marked by unevenness but the contours of that unevenness are now skewed toward certain areas of unexpected success and of approximation to Europe’s most successful societies on a few indicators. The challenge of delineating this record of uneven success and of explaining it offers social scientists many themes calling for rigorous and sustained research. All national cases are to some degree distinctive and therefore theoretically interesting but the broad cross-national significance of the Portuguese case and the challenges posed by studying it rigorously are perhaps especially pronounced.

Specifying new dualities: understanding changing patterns

In this panorama of significant unevenness - and of case-specific features that break out of regionally predominant patterns -, the work of scholars at ICS (and of their colleagues elsewhere) has been of extraordinary importance. This includes work on a wide variety of themes: Portuguese national identity (^{Sobral, 2004}; ²⁰¹⁰), patterns of economic development (^{Costa, Lains and Miranda, 2016}), gender relations and associated family dynamics (^{Aboim, Vasconcelos and Wall, 2013}), educational development (^{Vieira, 2007}) and the challenges of youth and growing up (^{Pais, 1999}). Alongside all of these social or economic matters, there are of course a great number of political phenomena studied by both political scientists and sociologists, including corruption, citizenship practice, attitudes toward inequality and the functioning of institutions such as the country’s semi-presidentialism and its party system. Some of these political matters involve the country’s distinctive past such as the purges of the revolutionary period (^{Pinto, 2001}; ²⁰⁰⁶) and dynamics rooted in the Estado Novo - including its failed liberalization (^{Fernandes, 2006}), whereas others involve memories of the past (^{Lobo, Pinto and Magalhães, 2016}). The contributions of ICS-based social scientists to the understanding of political phenomena in Portugal and their placement in comparative terms of reference are far too numerous to be covered in full here but it should be said that these contributions span multiple periods of the country’s political trajectory from authoritarian rule to revolutionary transformation and democratic life. Of course, many of the contributions of political analysts focus on features of the political system that include on the one hand elements of accomplishment and national success and on the other hand points of continuing - or new - difficulty and challenge. The democratic practice approach that I have developed in my work (^{Fishman, 2010}; 2011; 2019) tends to emphasize instances of relative success, linking them to the enduring legacies of Portugal’s revolutionary pathway to democracy, but examples of difficulty are also important elements of the country’s collective experience and they clearly deserve ample scholarly attention. Among the examples of difficulty or continuing challenges that have been identified in significant scholarly work, several that deserve attention include analyses of Pedro Magalhães on forms of political dissatisfaction and indicators of declining rejection of anti-democratic approaches to governance (^{Magalhães, 2023}) as well as public critiques of the functioning of the judicial system (^{Magalhães and Garoupa, 2020}); and equally importantly studies of corruption (^{Sousa, 2001}) and of perceptions of injustice (^{Cabral, Vala and Freire, 2003}) and civic involvement (^{Cabral, 2003}). Many superb political analysts have identified and analyzed areas of continuing difficulty and challenge.

Theorizing the bases for Portugal’s new dualities - and developmental breakthroughs

From an empirical standpoint, a great deal of excellent and important research on Portugal has tended to focus either on detailed and significant analyses of data limited to this case or alternatively on the commendable interest in placing such Portuguese data within broadly cross-national comparisons of a large number of country cases. Both of these endeavors are clearly very much worthwhile. However, I suggest that the greatest theoretical leverage to be drawn from analyses of the Portuguese experience requires conceptually oriented considerations of how this case differs from a smaller subset of other cases in ways that speak directly to large theoretical issues - such as the pursuit of the ideal of political equality in democracy (^{Dahl, 1998}; ²⁰⁰⁶) or any other equally large general objective that is handled in ways that vary by country case. This is the approach that the great Spanish social scientist, Juan Linz, regularly followed in his long series of highly innovative and theoretically oriented writings on politics and society in the case of Spain. Linz’s analyses of how actors and institutions in Spain handled a series of challenges - typically in ways different from theoretical expectations formulated by students of other national cases - helped provide the basis for a number of major theoretical contributions by Linz on authoritarian regimes and other forms of non-democratic rule (^{Linz, 1964}; ¹⁹⁷⁵), on breakdowns of democracy (^{Linz, 1978}), transitions to democracy and democratic consolidation (^{Linz and Stepan, 1996}). On one issue after another, Linz’s crucially important theoretical contributions to comparative social science were crafted through his analytical effort to make sense of unexpected features or dynamics found in the Spanish case - or in other cases that he studied. A conceptually oriented case study work of this Weberian nature (^{Fishman, 2007}) is especially valuable for theory construction; the trajectory and dynamics of Portugal before and under democracy -and during the country’s distinctive post-April 25 road to democracy - offer numerous opportunities for just this sort of theoretical work.

At the core of the transformed nature of the country’s unevenness, and central to the search for explanations of this new pattern, lies the extraordinary Portuguese pathway from dictatorship to democracy in 1974. The key to understanding this process is that although the Carnation Revolution did generate a transition to democracy, the experience that began on April 25 was much more than simply a transition to democracy. Portugal’s experience combined certain central features of all democratic transitions - the calling of new elections, the guarantee of fundamental political freedoms in those elections and the elaboration of a new democratic Constitution, providing institutional ground rules for electoral and political competition - with other dynamics linked to the specifically revolutionary character of the country’s pathway from dictatorship. Crucially, the Portuguese road to democracy was marked not simply by political revolution but significantly by social revolution in the sense theoretically formulated by Theda ^{Skocpol in her landmark study of States and Social Revolution (Skocpol, 1979}). The Carnation Revolution and the colonial wars that conditioned it led to a classic Skocpolian “state crisis” in which the capacity of the center of political power to enforce decisions through police action - or other instruments of coercion - was very significantly eroded. As a great deal of excellent research has clearly established ( ^{Bermeo, 1986}; ^{Durán Muñoz, 2000}; ^{Palacios Cerezales, 2003}), the deep erosion of state coercive capacity that was brought about by the revolutionary-era politicization and decline in the hierarchical discipline within the Armed Forces, crucially conditioned social mobilizations during that period of time, giving way to many types of socially transformative endeavors.

The socially transformative practices of the revolutionary period came in many forms, touching numerous dimensions of Portuguese society. The transformation of gender relations, guaranteeing equal rights for women, was an early promise of the revolution. Data from 1974, after the revolution, showed that Portugal had quickly become the first South European case in which the participation of women in the labor force had risen above the average for Europe as a whole - a rapid and deep transformation with wide consequences (^{Fishman, 2010}). Although some analysts have linked this transformation to the effects of the colonial wars on the availability of men for work within Portugal, the available data show a marked and rapid impact of the revolution itself (^{Fishman, 2019}; 2022). The pervasive purges (^{Pinto, 2001}; 2006) in government ministries, schools and news media outlets - among other institutions - significantly transformed not only the composition of those working within such institutions but also institutional practice itself in ways that endured afterwards, for example, within schools and the news media, helping to shape the broader outlines of “democratic practice” in inclusionary ways. Crucially, the revolution was also marked by a rapid expansion of new forms of political and cultural participation by ordinary citizens who came into the streets beginning on April 25. The outpouring of mass-level participation in politics and in the forging of new symbols and discourses linked the revolution’s partial inversion of social hierarchies to a broad reconfiguration of cultural forms and practices, an effect that proved to be very long-lasting in at least some of its consequences. The revolution did not simply end the Estado Novo. It also put in place new social relations and practices.

An additional point of obvious significance requires consideration: The social character of Portugal’s revolution quickly became explicitly socialist. Numerous enterprises and agricultural estates were nationalized or collectivized as a result of the converging influence of bottom-up mobilizations by workers and top-down ideological preferences of major sectors within the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas - MFA). The socialist character of the revolution was soon encoded in the new Constitution elaborated by the Assembly elected on April 25, 1975. However, it would be a large mistake to conflate the socialist and more broadly social character of the revolution. Certain key aspects of the social revolution were already in place prior to the explicitly socialist turn of the revolution. These features include transformations in gender relations, in forms of practice within schools and news organizations and a wide variety of cultural developments. The questioning, and in many cases the overturning, of existing social hierarchies was not limited to the economic matter of property ownership. When the socialist component of the revolution was ultimately reversed with the Constitutional revision and reprivatizations of 1989-1990, the more broadly social character of the Carnation Revolution remained very much in place, marking major elements of political and social development (^{Fishman, 2019}). Indeed, Portugal’s welfare state grew quickly after this shift away from socialism as such, and new approaches to the effort to reduce inequalities were developed. Nonetheless, from a broadly comparative standpoint, the early socialist character of Portugal’s post-April 25 pathway was to have considerable import in the inauguration of the global Third Wave of democratization. Before Portugal’s post-1974 experience, with its fusion of a public commitment to the development of democracy in the polity and socialism in the economy, a major impediment to worldwide democratic transition and consolidation had been the lack of “mutual tolerance” between advocates of capitalism and socialism. By showing that a newly established democracy could simultaneously guarantee crucial political rights and an economic approach initially defined as socialist in the Constitution, Portugal provided the world with a much needed example of mutual tolerance under democracy between advocates of socialism and capitalism (^{Fishman, 2018}). The (temporarily) socialist character of the system brought about by the revolution helps to explain how April 25 was able to inaugurate not only Portuguese democratization but also the worldwide Third Wave of democracy that brought free and representative government to parts of the globe that had long suffered from one form or another of anti-democratic rule.

Fusing social revolution and democratic transition: Portugal’s distinctiveness

Yet, at the same time, it must be stressed that the Portuguese road to democracy was much more than a classic social revolution. It was in every respect also a transition to democracy. Events in Portugal from April 25, 1974 through April 25, 1976 and beyond essentially wove together and combined central elements of two types of historical processes of transformation that are typically conceptualized as more or less different phenomena. Transitions to democracy by definition require that conditions be put in place to hold fully free, fair and competitive elections. This goal was a central promise of Portugal’s revolution that was realized on the first anniversary of the captains’ coup with the elections that chose the assembly which would write a new Constitution and then again one year later with the first elections for a new democratically elected constitutional government. The democratic transition was constructed on the foundation of public commitments of political actors and the elaboration of new institutions - and related constitutional guarantees - that have afforded conditions needed for the regular holding of fully free, fair and competitive elections. Democratic transitions are, by definition, processes that involve multiple steps that must be informed by fully democratic principles in order for the endpoint to qualify as a functioning democracy that meets the test of “authenticity” (^{Fishman, 2016}). In Portugal’s historically exceptional pathway, this process was socially and culturally conditioned by the revolutionary social relations and understandings of post-April 25 Portugal, thereby providing the new democracy with at least two foundational understandings that added considerable democratic “depth” (^{Fishman, 2016}) to the system’s democratic authenticity.

Portugal’s democracy has done more than what is minimally necessary for a political system to qualify as a democracy; the added features of democracy, as practiced in Portugal, can be understood as manifestations of democratic “depth”, one of several dimensions on which democracies vary. The two interrelated foundational understandings of democracy that have contributed to this outcome are first the inclusion of sectors of limited economic means and others who are socially marginal among the political actors viewed as fully legitimate participants in political life. Secondly, the predominant conception of democracy tends to view the activities of officially established representative institutions - such as the Assembly of the Republic - and expressions of citizen preferences that are articulated outside those institutions as two complementary underpinnings of democratic politics. These understandings, which were forged in the post-April 25 revolutionary context, have promoted a robustly inclusionary form of democratic practice that has predisposed elected representatives to take very seriously the views of demonstrators and others of limited economic means. Portugal’s post-revolutionary democratic practice has tended to promote responsiveness and inclusion both of which have, in turn, conditioned numerous public policy and societal outcomes. These features of Portuguese democratic practice help to explain why not only governments of the left or center-left but on crucial occasions also governments of the right or center-right have readjusted public policies in ways intended to reflect the preferences of citizens in the streets demonstrating their sentiments. Thus, by way of example, one of the most potentially regressive proposals of the bailout-induced period of austerity was reversed in 2012 under pressure from citizen protests - a fundamental reason why the crisis that began with the Great Recession actually witnessed a small decline in inequality in Portugal whereas inequality increased notably in many other cases during that period (^{Fishman, 2019}, chapter five). Numerous other public policy and societal outcomes that can be seen as examples of Portugal’s success under democracy - often placing the case outside the general pattern of southern Europe and closer to many northern European cases as noted here, can be seen as the direct or indirect result of the tendency toward responsiveness and inclusion.

Conceptual lessons: beyond the case of Portugal

Thus, the dualities characteristic of post-democratization in Portugal involve a good many elements of major success, allowing the country to rise above general South European patterns on matters such as the participation of women in the labor force, cultural tastes, educational achievement, the handling of poverty, trust in major political institutions and other crucial matters. I argue that the underlying socio-historical mechanisms responsible for this transformative pattern of social development under democracy were put in place by the country’s distinctive fusion of social revolution and democratic transition beginning in April 1974. Portugal’s revolutionary pathway to democracy generated a partial inversion of hierarchies, first inside the state and then in a variety of other institutions from schools to news media outlets, private firms and urban neighborhoods. At the same time, both through transformed types of practice - linked to the inversion of hierarchies - and the upsurge of new symbols, discourses and forms of expression, April 25 rapidly brought about a fundamental renewal and transformation of culture. The cultural changes brought about by April 25 were as significant as the more strictly political and social ones. And, crucially, the cultural transformations were to largely live on, conditioning ongoing practice in post-revolutionary Portugal. The cultural legacies of revolution are of many types including new capacities and symbols as well as transformed practices - linked to new understandings and assumptions. I emphasize the role of democratic practice, which is how actors understand and make use of the new possibilities for action opened up by democracy (^{Fishman, 2011}; ²⁰¹⁹). Portugal’s post-revolutionary democratic practice was forged initially during the revolutionary period but it has lived on in the polity at large as well as within crucial institutions such as the news media and the schools. A central assumption underpinning this practice is that democracy is constituted by the complementarity between the actions of representative institutions such as the parliament and the expression of citizen preferences outside those institutions - in the streets and elsewhere. That assumption, and the hierarchy-challenging experience of the revolution itself, have fostered an inclusionary polity in which voices of discontent - including those of low-income or socially marginal sectors - are typically considered to be politically relevant. It is this form of practice, itself a cultural legacy of the revolution, that largely explains why Portugal’s pattern of unevenness or dualities has shifted under democracy in ways that have generated areas of progress advancing the country’s performance outside the pattern most characteristic of Southern Europe.

Thus, the quite unusual experience of Portugal offers social scientists a great deal of material on which to work. This includes areas of unexpected success along with many remaining arenas that continue to exhibit quite disappointing patterns and outcomes. The country’s dualities very much live on, constituting an important basis for empirical work and conceptually oriented interpretation aimed at making sense of research findings. For those focused on empirical research on this national case, this underscores both the intrinsic complexity of their research tasks - given the need to locate and capture elements of duality or unevenness - and the conceptual significance of their work for comparatively oriented theoretical understandings of the contemporary world. Relatively small national cases such as the countries of Nordic Europe, or the Netherlands, have served as the empirical points of reference for major theoretical perspectives such as the power resources model of explanation for distributional and welfare state-oriented policies (^{Korpi and Shalev, 1979}; ^{Huber and Stephens, 2012}), or the consociational model for understanding how pluralistic societies can achieve consensus and governability under democracy (^{Lijphart, 1969}). The Portuguese case offers social scientists, including not only those specifically interested in Portuguese realities but also others primarily focused on other national cases, with solid bases for envisioning the logic underpinning social outcomes that tend to defy conventional expectations. Portuguese experience highlights a pathway to elements of societal success that rests on cultural legacies of inclusionary democratization brought about through a revolutionary process. That is not to say that the Portuguese experience can be mechanistically or simplistically applied to other national cases. But this argument is meant to suggest that the experience of Portugal can help to elucidate mechanisms of causation and patterns of outcome that may be found at least to some degree in other national cases. The significance of an inclusionary understanding of democracy and the causal relevance of cultural legacies of the past are not limited to the Portuguese case. Thus, the work of Portuguese social scientists, at ICS and elsewhere, is of significance well beyond the simple demographic weight of what is a fairly small country. Social science research on Portugal, a body of scholarship to which ICS and Análise Social have contributed centrally, holds great importance for the broadly shared objectives of comparative social science.