Party members and delegates: Portugal in a comparative perspective
Project Title
Party members and delegates: Portugal in a comparative perspective
Start and end dates
January 2014 - 2020
Scientific Area
Political Sciences
Chief Investigator CAPP:
Paula do Espírito Santo (CAPP/ISCSP/Ulisboa)
Chief Investigator FCSH:
Marco Lisi (FCSH – Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Research Team
| Researcher Name |
Institutional Afiliation |
| Bruno Ferreira da Costa | CAPP/ISCSP/ULisboa |
| Paula Espírito Santo | CAPP/ISCSP/ULisboa |
| Marco Lisi | FCSH |
Partner Institutions:
| Country | Entity |
| Portugal | Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas - Preponent |
| Portugal | Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas - Participant |
Consultants
| Name |
Institutional Filliation |
| Emily van Haute | Université Libre de Bruxelles |
| Paul Whiteley | University of Essex |
Summary
Our starting point is that the decline of party mobilisation and political socialisation is of great importance to better understand both how democracy works and how it may survive. At national level, party member activity has significant features that are deeply seated in the nation's political culture. Party mobilisation and political socialisation study will warrant development in the Portuguese context of the study of the choice of party members' activity upstream, profiles and motivations. The phenomena of independent candidates will also be analysed, including its relation and distance to parties, in Portugal, Brazil and Cape Verde.
The main objective of this project is to analyse the importance of political socialisation to the activities of party members in the main Portuguese parties (the Social Democratic Centre/Popular Party (CDS/PP), the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the Socialist Party (PS), as well as the political activism of independent candidates. The methodology is based on a survey, which had been validated within the MAPP international project research . One of the expected results was an original contribution to an object that has hardly been analysed in Portugal (Stock et al., 1985) on one hand.
On the other hand, this research is intended to find a framework for characterising the party members of the selected Portuguese parties reasoned and located from the point of view of political socialisation.
In addition to this, we hope to help contextualise causalities for pressing features of Western politics such as voter turnout and the lack of interest in politics or elections and voters' distance from political decision centres.