Democratic Quality in Southern Europe: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain 0268207755, 9780268207755

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DEMOCRATIC QUALIT Y IN SOUTHERN EUROPE

RECENT TITLES FROM THE HELEN KELLOGG INSTITUTE SERIES ON DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT

Paolo G. Carozza and Aníbal Pérez-­Liñan, series editors The University of Notre Dame Press gratefully thanks the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies for its support in the publication of titles in this series. Pedro Meira Monteiro The Other Roots: Wandering Origins in Roots of Brazil and the Impasses of Modernity in Ibero-­America (2017)

John Aerni-­F lessner Dreams for Lesotho: Independence, Foreign Assistance, and Development (2018) Roxana Barbulescu Migrant Integration in a Changing Europe: Migrants, European Citizens, and Co-­ethnics in Italy and Spain (2019)

Matthew C. Ingram and Diana Kapiszewski Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America (2019)

Kenneth P. Serbin From Revolution to Power in Brazil: How Radical Leftists Embraced Capitalism and Struggled with Leadership (2019) Manuel Balán and Françoise Montambeault Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America: The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship (2020)

Ligia Castaldi Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Legal Impact of the American Convention on Human Rights (2020) Paolo Carozza and Clemens Sedmak The Practice of Human Development and Dignity (2020)

Amber R. Reed Nostalgia after Apartheid: Disillusionment, Youth, and Democracy in South Africa (2020)

James J. Sheehan Making a Modern Political Order: The Problem of the Nation State (2023) Séverine Deneulin and Clemens Sedmak Integral Human Development: Catholic Social Teaching and the Capability Approach (2023)

Kathleen Bruhn Politics and the Pink Tide: A Comparative Analysis of Protest in Latin America (2024) For a complete list of titles from the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, see http://​www​.undpress​.nd​.edu.

DEMOCRATIC QUALIT Y IN SOUTHERN EUROPE F R ANCE , G REE CE , ITALY, P OR T UG AL , AND SPAIN

edited by

T IA G O F ER NAND E S

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Notre Dame University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress​.nd​.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Revised and translated from the original Portuguese edition: Variedades de democracia na Europa do sul, 1968–2016: Uma comparação entre Espanha, França, Grécia, Itália e Portugal, Imprensa de Ciéncias Sociais, 2017. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023946553 ISBN: 978-0-268-20775-5 (Hardback) ISBN: 978-0-268-20774-8 (WebPDF) ISBN: 978-0-268-20778-6 (Epub3)

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations

ONE

Introduction. Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe, 1960s–2010s Tiago Fernandes Elections: Institutional Frameworks and Electoral Participation João Cancela

xv 1

55

TWO

Party Systems Edalina Rodrigues Sanches

90

THREE

Direct Democracy José Santana Pereira and Tiago Tibúrcio

134

FOUR

Media and Politics José Santana Pereira and Pedro Diniz de Sousa

163

FIVE

Subnational Democracy Pedro T. Magalhães

189

SIX

Women’s Political Representation Edna Costa

217

vi Contents

SEVEN

Inequality and the Welfare State Rui Branco



Conclusion. Origins of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe: Legacies from the Authoritarian Past, Civil Society, and Progressive Coalitions Tiago Fernandes List of Contributors

257

287 339

Index 343

F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S

F IGURE S 1.1.  Electoral chronology in southern Europe (1968–2014)   59 1.2.  Vote buying in southern Europe   69 1.3.  Expenditure in particularistic or public goods   70 1.4.  Autonomy of electoral administration   74 1.5.  Evolution of electoral participation   76 2.1.  Effective number of parliamentary parties (1945–2019)   94–95 2.2.  Electoral volatility (1945–2019)   98–99 2.3.  Most-­voted parties in southern Europe, 1945–2019 (%)   122–123 2.4.  Economic performance indicators   124 3.1.  Abrogative referenda in Italy (1974–2016)   150 3.2.  Index of bottom-­up direct democracy: Abrogative initiatives

and popular referenda in the European Union, Norway, and Switzerland, 2000–2014   155

3.3.  Index of top-­down direct democracy: Mandatory referenda in the European Union, Norway, and Switzerland, 2000–2014   156 3.4.  Index of top-­down direct democracy: Plebiscites in the European Union, Norway, and Switzerland, 2000–2014   156 4.1.  Pluralism: Presence of diverse perspectives in the media   170  vii

viii  Figures and Tables

4.2.  Political-­partisan pluralism in the media   171 4.3.  Self-­censorship by journalists   174 4.4.  Corruption of journalists   175 4.5.  Government censorship   177 4.6.  Harassment of journalists   179 4.7.  Criticism of the government in the media   180 5.1.  Local government index   192 5.2.  Regional government index   193 6.1.  Feminization rate of the executive and the parliament, 1968–2019  230–231 6.2.  Feminization rate of the executive and the parliament, across countries, most recent election   232 7.1.  Egalitarian democracies, 1968–2012   262–263 7.2  Social expenditure in southern Europe and in the EU-­15 (% GDP)   266 7.3.  Welfare generosity: Southern Europe, the UK, and Sweden (1971–2018)  269 7.4.  Public health care expenditure (per capita, constant prices = 2015 euros)   271

TABL E S 1.1.  Formal institutions in the five countries   65 1.2.  Disproportionality between votes and mandates   66 1.3.  Random effects regression model (dependent variable: electoral participation)   78 2.1  Overview of the selected variables   106

Figures and Tables  ix

2.2  Explanatory factors for the characteristics of party systems   107 3.1.  Direct democracy in southern Europe   153 6.1.  Electoral system and electoral quotas, per country   234 7.1.  Levels of equality in resource distribution in southern Europe   261 7.2.  Level of social expenditure (total per capita and PPS, EU-­15 = 100)   268 7.3.  Share of seats in parliament and cabinet control by left parties, 1980–2017  273

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of a research project about the processes of democratization of southern Europe, developed within the international scholarly network Varieties of Democracy (V-­Dem) and financially supported by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation (FFMS) of Portugal. Its intellectual beginnings started in 2009, when I was a visiting scholar at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame and participated in a working group on democracy led by Michael Coppedge. I’d like to thank Michael for his invitation to participate in this group and later to join the V-­Dem global team as the coordinator for southern Europe, as well as for the many stimulating conversations over the years. At the Kellogg Institute and the University of Notre Dame, a group of colleagues has made the debate about democracy an unforgettable experience. I am especially indebted to Robert Fishman and Andy Gould for their friendship and support. I was also fortunate to receive many comments and sug­ gestions from Scott Mainwaring, J. Samuel Valenzuela, Julia Lopez, Cas Mudde, André Coelho, Dan Kselman, Valeria Palanza, Victoria Lang­ land, Monika Nalepa, Mariela Szwarcberg, Taylor Boas, John Stephens, Evelyne Huber, A. James McAdams, Isabel Ferreira Gould, Gabriela Ippolito-­O’Donnell, Carlos Guevara Mann, Paul Ocobock, Ben Junge, Thomas Kselman, Ted Beatty, Michael Driessen, Sean Kelly, Omar Lizardo, Jessica Collett, Sean McGraw, John Deak, Gina Costa, and the late Guillermo O’Donnell. I would like to also thank for their support the wonderful staff of the Kellogg Institute, in particular Judy Bartlett, Therese Hanlon, Wendy Harris, Elizabeth Rankin, Steven Reifenberg, Holly Rivers, Sharon Schierling, and Denise Wright.

 xi

xii Acknowledgments

Back in Portugal, I joined the European V-­Dem team, led by Staffan Lindberg of the University of Gothenburg. I would like to thank Staffan for his inexhaustible sympathy and support. Staffan in the recent years has been a stimulating intellectual partner and coauthor of many projects; as have Michael Bernhard, João Cancela, and Rui Branco, whom I also thank. In several discussion forums in Lisbon, the following people made valuable comments on the chapters of this book: Pedro Magalhães and Nuno Garoupa (as discussants) and Ana Espírito Santo, António Costa Pinto, António José Teixeira, Bárbara Reis, Carlos Gaspar, Carlos Jalali, Catherine Moury, Enrico Borghetto, Filipa Raimundo, Marco Lisi, and Pedro Tavares de Almeida. I am grateful to João Cancela for his work on the essential task of creating the database that is at the origin of this volume as well as the graphs. Between 2011 and 2020, the Political Studies Department of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences–NOVA University of Lisbon (FCSH-­UNL) and the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI) provided institutional and financial support for the further development of this book. I would like to express my thanks to Nuno Severiano Teixeira, Carlos Gaspar, Pedro Tavares de Almeida, Rui Branco, Tiago Moreira de Sá, Diogo Ramada Curto, Margarida Marques, João Sàágua, and Francisco Caramelo. In February 2020 I joined the Department of Political Science and Public Policy at the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE), where this book was concluded. I would like to express my gratitude to my new colleagues, Pedro Adão e Silva, Helena Carreiras, Rui Pena Pires, Maria de Lurdes Rodrigues, António Firmino da Costa, Luís Capucha, Helge Jorgens, Luís Nuno Rodrigues, Guya Accornero, and Ricardo Paes Mamede. Versions of the main arguments of this book have been presented over the years at meetings of the Council for European Studies. I thank the many helpful comments by Amel Ahmed, Sener Akturk, David Andersen, David Art, Mabel Berezin, Sheri Berman, Michael Bernhard, Giovanni Capoccia, Robert Fishman, Steve Hanson, Jeffrey Kopstein, Jørgen Møller, Svend-­Erik Skaanig, and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette. This book is a revised and enlarged version of a Portuguese-­language edition published in Lisbon by Imprensa de Ciências Sociais in 2017. I would like to express my gratitude to its editors, José Machado Pais,

Acknowledgments xiii

Marta Castelo Branco, and Clara Cabral. Susana Serras Pereira and Claúdia Araújo did a wonderful job with the translation into English. This book would not have been possible without the financial support of the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation. I am indebted to António Araújo, Jaime Gama, Nuno Garoupa, João Tiago Gaspar, Pedro Magalhães, Gonçalo Matias, and Carlos Jalali not only for the Foundation’s generosity but also for their commitment and interest in participating in the debates the project has generated. Pedro Magalhães and Gonçalo Matias, in particular, played an essential role. The project benefited immensely from their professionalism and constant feedback. Finally, I would like to thank the comments and suggestions of the editors of Notre Dame University Press, in particular Aníbal Pérez-­Liñan, Rachel Kindler, and Elisabeth Magnus, as well as the two anonymous referees.

A B B R E V I AT I O N S F O R P O L I T I C A L A N D L A B O R O R G A N I Z AT I O N S ( B Y C O U N T R Y )

F R ANCE

CFDT CGT CIR FGDS FN FNAF GAM LR LREM MRP PCF PS PSU RPR SFIO

French Democratic Confederation of Labor / ­Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail General Confederation of Labor / Confédération Générale du Travail Convention of the Republican Institutions / Convention des Institutions Républicaines Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left / Fédération de la Gauche Démocrate et Socialiste National Front / Front National National Front for French Algeria / Front National pour l’Algérie Française Municipal Action Group / Groupe d’Action Municipale The Republicans / Les Républicains The Republic on the Move / La République en Marche! Republican Popular Movement / Mouvement Républi­ cain Populaire French Communist Party / Parti Communiste Français Socialist Party / Parti Socialiste Unified Socialist Party / Parti Socialiste Unifié Rally for the Republic / Rassemblement pour la République French Section of the Workers’ International / Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière

 xv

xvi  Abbreviations for Political and Labor Organizations (by country)

UDF UDR UMP

Union for French Democracy / Union pour la Démocratie Française Union for the Defense of the Republic / Union pour la Défense de la République Union for a Popular Movement / Union pour un Mouve­ment Populaire

G REE CE

ANEL DIMAR EDA EDE EK ELA EP ERE GSEE IDEA KKE LAOS ND PASOK SYRIZA

National Patriotic Alliance / Anexartitoi Ellines Democratic Left / Dimokratiki Aristera United Democratic Left / Eniéa Dimokratikí Aristerá National Democratic Union / Ethnikí Dimokratikí Énosis Union of the Center / Énosi Kentróon People’s Revolutionary Struggle / Epanastatikós Laïkós Agónas National Front / Ethniko Metopo Radical Union / Ethnikí Rizospastikí Énosis General Confederation of Greek Workers / Geniki Syno­mospondia Ergaton Ellados Holy Bond of Greek Officers / Ieros Desmos Ellinon Axiomatikon Communist Party of Greece / Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas Popular Orthodox Rally / Laikós Orthódoxos Synagermós New Democracy / Néa Dimokratía Pan-­Hellenic Socialist Movement / Panellínio Sosialistikó Kínima Coalition of the Radical Left—Progressive Alliance / Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás—Proodeftikí Symmachía

ITALY

AN

National Alliance / Alleanza Nazionale

Abbreviations for Political and Labor Organizations (by country)  xvii

CCD-­CDU Christian Democratic Center–United Christian Democrats / Centro Cristiano Democratico–Cristiani Democratici Uniti CGIL Italian General Confederation of Labor / Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro DC Christian Democracy / Democrazia Cristiana DS Democrats of the Left / Democratici di Sinistra FI Forward Italy / Forza Italia LN Northern League / Lega Nord M5S Five Star Movement / Movimento 5 Stelle MSI Italian Social Movement / Movimento Sociale Italiano PCI Italian Communist Party / Partito Comunista d’Italia PD Democratic Party / Partito Democratico PDS Democratic Party of the Left / Partito Democratico della Sinistra PdL People of Freedom / Popolo della Libertà PLI Italian Liberal Party / Partito Liberale Italiano PRI Italian Republican Party / Partito Repubblicano Italiano PSDI Italian Democratic Socialist Party / Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano PSI Italian Socialist Party / Partito Socialista Italiano P OR T UG AL

AD APU ASDI ATTAC BE CDS-­PP CGTP

Democratic Alliance / Aliança Democrática United People Alliance / Aliança Povo Unido Independent Social Democratic Action / Acção Social Democrata Independente Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens / Association pour la Taxation des Transactions Financières et pour l’Action Citoyenne Left Bloc / Bloco de Esquerda Democratic and Social Center–People’s Party / Centro Democrático Social–Partido Popular General Confederation of Portuguese Workers / Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses

xviii  Abbreviations for Political and Labor Organizations (by country)

CH CIG

Enough / Chega Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality / Comissão para a Cidadania e Igualdade de Género FRS Republican and Socialist Front / Frente Republicana e Socialista IL Liberal Initiative / Iniciativa Liberal L Free / LIVRE MDP/CDE Portuguese Democratic Movement / Democratic Electoral Commission // Movimento Democrático Português / Comissão Democrática Eleitoral MFA Armed Forces Movement / Movimento das Forças Armadas PAN People-­Animals-­Nature / Pessoas-­Animais-­Natureza PCP Portuguese Communist Party / Partido Comunista Português PEV Partido Ecologista “Os Verdes” / Ecologist Party “The Greens” PPM Popular Monarchist Party / Partido Popular Monárquico PRD Party for Democratic Renewal / Partido Renovador Democrático PS Socialist Party / Partido Socialista PSD Social Democratic Party / Partido Social Democrata QSLT Screw the Troika! / Que Se Lixe a Troika! UEDS Democratic Socialist Left Union / União da Esquerda para a Democracia Socialista UGT General Workers Union / União Geral de Trabalhadores UN/ANP National Union / National Popular Action // União ­Nacional / Ação Nacional Popular SPAIN

AP C’s CCOO EC

Popular Alliance / Alianza Popular Citizens—Party of the Citizenry / Ciudadanos—Partido de la Ciudadanía Workers’ Commissions / Comisiones Obreras Left of Catalonia / Esquerra de Catalunya

Abbreviations for Political and Labor Organizations (by country)  xix

EE ERC ETA FN IU MC PCE PNV PP PSOE UCD UGT

Basque Country Left / Euskadiko Ezkerra Republican Left of Catalonia / Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya Homeland and Liberty / Euskadi Ta Askatasuna New Force / Fuerza Nueva Left United / Izquierda Unida Catalan Minority / Minoria Catalana Spanish Communist Party / Partido Comunista de España Basque Nationalist Party / Partido Nacionalista Vasco Popular Party / Partido Popular Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party / Partido Socialista Obrero Español Union of the Democratic Center / Unión de Centro Democrático General Workers Union / Unión General de Trabajadores

INTRODUCTION

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe, 1960s–2010s Tiago Fernandes

This book compares the evolution and transformation of five southern European democracies from the late 1960s to the Great Recession of the 2010s. It argues that their long-­run quality is best explained by the formation, during the cycle of protest of the 1960s and 1970s, of what we call progressive coalitions, temporary alliances between the main political parties of the center-­left and the radical left with variegated grassroots social movement organizations (e.g., unions, students’, neigh­ borhood, women’s). The stronger these alliances, the higher would be the representation of popular interests in the regime, achieved through the incorporation of civil society into the state and into policymaking. This contributed to a better quality of democracy in the long run. Such coalitions were wide and strong in France and Portugal, less so in Spain, and were ex­tremely narrow and weak in Greece and Italy. Moreover, we show that the formation of a progressive coalition was shaped by legacies inherited from previous authoritarian pasts. If 1

2  Tiago Fernandes

there was a strong presence of an antidemocratic right in the state apparatus, the party system, and civil society during the protest cycle of the 1960s–’70s, the reaction to popular protest and left-­wing mobilization would be more repressive and violent. This generated a cycle of polarization in civil society that would inhibit the consolidation of a progressive coalition by making part of the social movement sector engage in political violence, while simultaneously pushing the radical and the center-­ left parties to cut their ties with social movements and instead to favor alliances with clientelist parties of the center-­right. The consequence of this turn to the right would be a low-­quality democracy, as the left lost its reformist capacity and came to accept and participate in a regime much structured around clientelistic exchanges. This introduction is organized as follows. First, it discusses the common features of southern Europe, considering its historical background and patterns of socioeconomic and political development; second, it theorizes the notion of quality of democracy and presents the main findings of the thematic chapters of this book, which analyze a diversity of dimensions of democracy in the five countries from the 1960s–’70s to the present (elections and electoral participation; party systems; media; mechanisms of direct democracy; subnational government; female political representation; welfare state); third, it examines and critically discusses the main contemporary theories of democratization; finally, it presents the central arguments of this book—the notions of progressive coalition and of legacies of authoritarianism—which are further developed in the Conclusion through a historical-­comparative analysis of the democratic development of the five southern European countries. PAT T ERNS OF DEMO CR AC Y IN SO U T HERN EUR OPE , 19 6 0S—2010S

The 1960s and 1970s were southern Europe’s last great period of (re)democratization from below. Although this region was part of a long worldwide cycle of protest that affected both industrialized and long-­ established democracies, such as the United States, and the peripheral and authoritarian regimes of Latin America and eastern Europe, it was here that the most striking cycles of protest occurred. Events such as May 1968 in France, the Carnations Revolution of 1974 in Portugal, and

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  3

the Years of Lead in Italy stand out as conjunctures of intense political contention and symbolic significance, which have remained in collective memory and have shaped democratic institutions to this day (Bermeo 1997; Collier 1999; della Porta et al. 2018; Fishman 2019; Ekiert 1996; Mouzelis 1986; McAdam 1999; O’Donnell 1973). Furthermore, this period can be considered the last great revolutionary wave of Europe, when collective action combined demands of immediate material well-­being (e.g., better wages, social protection) with radical claims for a rapid transformation of the existing political and socioeconomic structures, like the patriarchal family, the capitalist system, and liberal democracy itself. Influenced by African and Asian anticolonial movements, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the American civil rights movement, and the theoretical debates within western Marxism, new social movements such as those of students, neighborhoods, and women engaged in struggles for autonomy and self-­realization alongside one of the vaster workers’ mobilizations of European history. Together, in the words of Michel Crozier, they saw “revolution as a way of life” (Crozier 1981, 236; Anderson 1989, 95–96; Aron 1996; Bayat 2013; Bell 1996; Crouch 2018; Gorz 1975; Hudson, Lowenthal, and MacFarquar 1963; Hoffmann 1981; Offe 1994; della Porta 2018; Rosanvallon 2000, 410–12; Suri 2003; Smith 1987, 126–30; Tarrow 2018; Müller 2011, 176 –78). Southern Europe is thus a particularly interesting area to study the ways in which political and social mobilization lead to long-­term institutional and social transformations. Between the end of World War II and the mid-­1960s, the political regimes of this region, both democratic (France, Italy) and authoritarian (Greece, Portugal, and Spain), exercised a form of rule that was highly centralized, based on a combination of selective clientelist co-­optation and the exclusion of vast segments of the popular classes (Malefakis 1995; Sapelli 1995). The Iberian right-­ wing dictatorships were, of course, the exponent of this, embodying the Linzian ideal type of an authoritarian regime, with policymaking in the hands of a selected few, and relying on a mix of coercion (secret police, mandatory corporatist institutions) and demobilization for mass control (Anderson 1989, 76; Bermeo 1986, 18–20, 45; Fishman 1990; Linz 1964, 1973; Pinto 1995; Ruiz 1994; Schmitter 1999). Greece’s postwar political regime was not a full dictatorship, but it was still quite exclusionary, a semicompetitive and clientelist order dominated by the right-­wing ERE

4  Tiago Fernandes

(the Radical Union), which justified depriving a significant part of the population of political rights on the basis of a fierce anticommunist ideology. And Italy and Fifth Republic France, although formally liberal democracies, were also ruled in a highly centralized and exclusionary fashion by conservative governments of Catholic inspiration, with anticommunist feelings again serving as an ideological glue of a coalition of the urban and rural middle classes. In spite of some expansion of the welfare state and promotion of interest group bargaining, ancient habits of bureaucratic centralization and political despotism remained. In fact, France after the transition to the Fifth Republic in 1958 had reinforced its administrative centralization. It strengthened the power and privileges of the bureaucrats trained in the Grandes Écoles and of the regional prefects—corps that had been quite powerful during Vichy’s authoritarian regime (1940–44) and now once more formed a closed political caste. The executive branch also became almost totally dependent on the figure of President Charles de Gaulle, who eliminated any trait of collegiality in the council of ministers. In the aftermath of the 1961 coup attempt in Algeria, de Gaulle proclaimed a state of emergency, acquiring even more extraordinary powers, and then, through a plebiscite in 1962 that approved the direct election of the presidency, reduced his accountability to the National Assembly. State control of the media (TV, radio, newspapers), phone tapping, and the use of parallel police forces (the Barbouzes) were quite common. The concentration of power in the state and especially in the presidency was immense, making the Fifth Republic, in the words of Sidney Tarrow, “a quasi-­plebiscitarian presidential democracy” (Tarrow 1975, 591; Andrews 1981; Berger 1974, 41–42; Defrasne 1983, 108; Hoffmann 1963, 48–51; Petitfils 1981, 54–55; Skach 2005; Warner 2001; Müller 2011, 138–41). Italy’s political system was less hierarchical and centralized but still very exclusionary and repressive, especially in relation to the left-­wing sector of the union movement, which, between the 1940s and the late 1960s, was deprived of equal bargaining and civic rights. Prefects were used by the government in labor disputes, often prohibiting public meetings and demonstrations, and police repression in factories and during labor protests and strikes was the norm. Especially in the 1950s, workers often perished in confrontations with the police, with many more being wounded and imprisoned (Franzosi 1995, 213; LaPalombara 1964, 40).

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  5

In Greece in the 1950s and early 1960s the rights to strike and to free association were severely restricted. As in the Iberian dictatorships, citizens were forced to join the professional and interest organizations of the state corporatist regime, and civil servants had to swear loyalty to the regime. In the countryside, political control was established through “political intimidation,” carried out by military units of highly conservative officers (the Holy Bond of Greek Officers, IDEA) and by electoral manipulation and fraud (García and Karakatsanis 2006; Mouzelis 1978, 111–12, 127–30; Mouzelis 1986, 136–37; Pappas 1998; Seferiades 1999, 23; Sotiropoulos 1996, 19). On par with state despotism, clientelism also permeated the political relationships between elites and the masses. This was, in some way, a continuation of practices dating back to the nineteenth century, whereby governments, through networks of local elites, resorted to the particularistic use of state resources in exchange for popular acquiescence and electoral support (Almeida 1991; Bermeo and Nord 2000; Bermeo 2010; Pérez-­Díaz 1993). Italy perfected this system under the prolonged rule of the Christian Democrats (DC) between the late 1940s and the early 1990s. But it was also a widespread practice in Greece and authoritarian Iberia (Diamandouros et al. 2006; Jerez Mir 1996; LaPalombara 1964, 306; Putnam 1993; Ramos 1986; Sotiropoulos 1996, 11; Sotiropoulos 2006, 203; Tarrow 1990, 29–30). In France it was less common, although the Gaullist party UDR (Union for the Defense of the Republic) frequently used the public administration for political ends, channeling state resources through loyal interest groups, a situation similar to Italy during the DC’s rule. Widespread informal networks of civil servants, MPs, and ministers also took advantage of the state’s bureaucracy to feed resources to their common region of origin (Suleiman 1974, 361–63). Finally, as previously mentioned, it was probably in southern Europe that the contentious and revolutionary character of the 1960s and 1970s was most strongly felt. In fact, this protest wave continued a centuries-­ long tradition of insurrectionary collective action, where strike waves, rebellions, and near revolutions had been common occurrences (Almond and Verba 1963, 308–9; Banfield 1967; Birnbaum 1988, 71–73; Hayward 1973, 209; Hobsbawm, 1998; Hoffmann 1963, 6–8, 10–12; Kriesi 1996; Tarrow 1967; Tarrow 1997, 211; Tilly 1986, 344–47). The more obvious cases in this respect were France and Portugal. In the aftermath

6  Tiago Fernandes

of the wave of protests initiated in May 1968, French students and workers broke conservative rule, defeated de Gaulle, and pushed the state to accept wide reforms (Hobsbawm 1998). And the Portuguese revolution of 1974–75 can be considered as the last socialist revolution of western Europe. Following the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire, waves of popular mobilization in cities and the countryside temporarily subverted the principles of social hierarchy, in the apt expression of Robert Fishman, occupying vacant houses, municipalities, industrial plants, and agricultural land (Fishman 2011, 2019; see also Bermeo 1986; Cerezales 2003; Downs 1983; Hammond 1988; Martins 2018, 152; Ramos Pinto 2008; Santos 1992; Schmitter 1975). As Rafael Duran-­Muñoz (2000) documented in his analysis of workers’ protest during 1974–75, 57 percent of the Portuguese collective actions and frames were transgressive and radical. This period featured one of the biggest mobilizations of workers of twentieth-­century Europe. Italy and Spain lived through an almost unstoppable wave of strikes from the early 1960s onward, where whole categories of workers traditionally quiescent, such as unskilled laborers, internal migrants, and nonunionized salarymen, joined skilled industrial workers, white-­collar workers, and public-­sector employees. In the autumn of 1969 this wave reached its peak in Italy, with nearly one and a half million workers going on strike (Berger and Piore 1980, 34–35; Crouch 1994, 233; Ginsborg 1990, 319; della Porta and Rucht 1991; Ross 1975; Tarrow 1990, 116–18). In Spain, worker mobilization kept growing from within the interstices of the state corporatist system to the public sphere until the elites of the authoritarian regime were forced to promote a transition toward democracy between 1975 and 1977 (Fishman 1990; Maravall 1978; Pérez-­Díaz 1993). A strong neighborhood movement also emerged in southern Europe (e.g., the French Municipal Action Groups—GAM), as a reaction to the new problems generated by widespread postwar urbanization, like housing conditions, insufficient social infrastructure (schools, parks, daycare centers, public transportation), and limited local democracy. The Spanish neighborhood movement was perhaps the largest of western Europe and together with the unions became a significant actor in pushing for democratization (Castells 1983; Grémion 1987, 240; Katznelson 1992).

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  7

But despite relatively similar starting conditions, since the 1960s–’70s southern European democracies have also shown marked divergences in democratic development, with national patterns remaining stable over long periods of time. In our analysis, France and Portugal usually performed better in terms of the quality of their democracies, followed by Spain. The worst-­performing democracies were Italy and Greece. Moreover, a finding common to most of the chapters in this book is that the quality of democracy in southern Europe was strongly associated with the strength and impact of civil society at this critical juncture. This book thus seeks to understand how the long-­term impact of the cycle of protest of the 1960s and ’70s led to national differences in the incorporation of civil society that in turn shaped the quality of the democracies of the region, a theme that will be more fully developed in the Conclusion. What is democratic quality and how should it be measured? We define quality of democracy according to three dimensions. First, we look at the robustness of (some aspects of ) its electoral and liberal characteristics, usually considered the constitutive element of any modern democratic regime (Coppedge et al. 2015; Coppedge, Gerring, Lindberg, et al. 2020; Fishman 2016; Gould 1999). Some traits need to be present in any regime for it to be considered a democracy: free, fair, and universal elections, civic freedoms like the right to form associations and political parties, freedom of protest, right to access information, equality before the law, and parliamentary and judicial control over governments. These principles are crucial to allow citizens to express their demands and to make rulers accountable. As Robert Dahl (1971) argued, they are also inseparable and self-­reinforcing. For instance, the rights of associational freedom and access to alternative sources of information are fundamental for the existence of free and fair elections. In this book, we analyze two aspects of the core conception of democracy—free and fair elections, especially the degree to which they are free from practices of electoral corruption and political clientelism (Cancela, chapter 1), and the levels of freedom and pluralism of the media (Santana Pereira and Diniz de Sousa, chapter 4). Democratic quality can also include other features that complement the core elements mentioned above—what Robert Fishman (2016) considers derivative dimensions of democracy. In fact, the protest cycle of the 1960s–’70s widened the meaning and scope of democracy, as social

8  Tiago Fernandes

movements advanced cultural and institutional demands that made one think about democracy as a set of practices and institutions beyond the traditional aspects of free and fair elections and parliamentary competition. Definitions of democracy have since evolved to include egalitarian and participatory aspects (Barber 1984; Coppedge, Gerring, Lindberg, et al. 2020, 37–38; Mansbridge 1980; see also Fung and Wright 2003; Gibson 2013; Mainwaring and Scully 2010; O’Donnell 2010). The participatory dimension posits that the more varied and open the institutional opportunities for participation, as well as the actual level of citizens’ participation (e.g., turnout, civic engagement), the higher democracy’s quality, since decision-­making will be more responsive, egalitarian, and accountable to citizens’ demands and interests. Several of this book’s chapters analyze these aspects of democratic life, ranging from electoral systems and turnout (Cancela, chapter 1) to party systems (Sanches, chapter 2), direct democracy (Santana Pereira and Tibúrcio, chapter 3), and subnational government (Magalhães, chapter 5). The egalitarian dimension of democracy considers that citizens are able to fully engage in public life only if their access to material (e.g., income, wealth) and other resources (e.g., education, health) is not so unevenly distributed as to generate persistent inequalities in participation and voice, something that would permanently distort the political process. Also, when structural inequality is very high, even the working of the core rules of democratic competition and representation can be weakened (Bernhard, Fernandes, and Branco 2017; Coppedge, Gerring, Lindberg, et al. 2020, 28–40; Desai 2007; Esping-­Andersen 1985; O’Donnell, Cullell, and Iazzetta 2004; Roberts 1998; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; Sandbrook et al. 2007; Wright 2010). For example, a high concentration of land ownership is associated with high levels of electoral fraud and political clientelism (Ziblatt 2017). The aspects of the egalitarian dimension analyzed in this book are the degree of universalism of national welfare and health systems (Branco, chapter 7) and gender equality, measured by women’s representation in parliaments and governments (Costa, chapter 6). This volume uses a variety of data sources and methodologies. All chapters relied on the rich database of the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-­Dem), suitable for large N-­analyses, complemented with an abundant use of qualitative historical material derived from

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  9

secondary literature and primary sources, more suitable for a comparative historical analysis (Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, et al. 2020). Most chapters combine what Michael Coppedge has called the thin (quantitative studies) and the thick (comparative-­historical analysis) research traditions. Thin quantitative indicators of democracy were first used to generate variations of interest, raise questions, and find patterns of association between variables. Next, a thick approach was developed in order to uncover the historical causes and mechanisms that produced our outcomes of interest, the particular historical patterns of democratic quality in southern Europe (Coppedge 1999, 2012; Coppedge and Gerring 2011; Coppedge, Gerring, Lindberg, Skaaning, Teorell, Altman, Andersson, et al. 2016a, 2016b; Lindberg et al. 2014). Free and fair elections are an essential dimension of democracy. Without these, a regime cannot truly be considered democratic. In chapter 1, João Cancela examines elections in southern Europe in terms of both their institutional framework and their patterns of participation. Analyzing sixty-­four legislative elections in the five countries from 1968 to 2014, and regarding the organization and execution of the electoral process itself, Cancela shows how vote-­buying practices persisted in Italy and Greece but vanished elsewhere in the region. Other irregularities— such as the low transparency of campaign donations and the particularistic use of public works to draw support to governments—were also common in these two countries. Italy and Greece, during most of the period under analysis, can be classified as cases of mass party clientelism. In Italy, a form of cartel party system took root between 1946 and 1992, with the DC as the dominant actor, at the center of a wide network of clientelist exchanges, but at times also including other parties (socialists, republicans, and in the 1970s, the Communist Party). DC was the backbone of the regime for decades, based on a coalition of regional and local party machines, controlling the vote through the selective allocation of benefits channeled by the state and public services. Preferential voting reinforced this system too. A similar pattern developed in Greece, where linkages between voters and parties were also established via the indiscriminate use of state resources. In democratic Spain these practices were more localized, prevalent mainly in the regions of Andalusia and Extremadura, especially after the Socialist Party reached national government in 1982.

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In Portugal and France, on the contrary, since the early 1970s, the emergency of highly competitive and ideologically mobilized party systems based on a clear-­cut competition between left and right erased most of the vestiges of clientelist exchanges (Cancela, chapter 1). In democratic theory, the rules for the conversion of votes into mandates—what is usually called the electoral system—constitute a frequent criterion through which to assess the degree of accountability of representatives toward voters. Accountability is supposedly higher in the systems that rely on a direct choice of the individual representative by the electorate (majoritarian systems and open-­lists proportional systems), while proportional systems with closed lists are considered to be the least favorable in making those elected accountable to the electorate. Electoral systems can also be assessed by the degree to which they allow the entry of new parties in the parliament (Cancela, chapter 1; Gallagher 2015; Lijphart 1999; Nohlen 1984). Electoral systems have varied significantly in southern Europe. Portugal and Spain established proportional electoral systems in the start of the democratic period (1975 and 1977, respectively). France, with the exception of the 1986 election, always followed the majoritarian principle. And in Greece and Italy, electoral systems have frequently changed, with some elections being held both in accordance with the proportional principle (and, at occasions, with open lists) and others with the majoritarian principle. The significance of the electoral system for the quality of democracy takes a new perspective in João Cancela’s chapter. It was in the democracies with the greatest electoral irregularities—Greece and Italy—that the highest variance in electoral systems took place. The rules for tallying votes and apportioning mandates were constantly modified in these countries, as political elites were not able to come to an agreement on this basic rule of democratic competition. No electoral reform has ever been the result of a broad interparty consensus. On the contrary, France, Portugal, and Spain had a much greater electoral system stability. In terms of the degree of proportionality of the system, Spain and Portugal established electoral systems based on plurinominal districts and closed lists. Still, in Spain a mandatory threshold of 3 percent of the vote at the electoral district level (the minimum percentage of votes

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  11

a party must receive to be allocated a mandate) and the existence of low-­magnitude districts created higher disproportionality. But in Greece disproportionality would be even greater. A rule of “reinforced proportionality” led to a disproportionally higher share of mandates attributed to the bigger parties in fifty-­six uni-­and plurinominal districts, to the disadvantage of small parties. Another rule, awarding fifty more parliamentary seats to the election winner, reinforced this tendency (Cancela, chapter 1). Portugal has had the most proportional electoral system in southern Europe, making its democracy especially open to the representation of newly formed political parties. This unusual institutional openness has had positive effects on the quality of democracy by allowing the regular incorporation of new party forces into the institutional realm and the democratic process, such as the center-­left PRD (Party for Democratic Renewal) in the 1980s, and the radical Left Bloc (BE) since 1999. In the remaining countries, it was only during the Great Recession that outsider parties were able to surmount the traditional barriers of the electoral system. But contrary to Portugal this represented a loss in political stability and a rise in polarization. For example, during the Great Recession of 2009–15 it coincided in Greece with the virtual extinction of the established parties of the center-­left and -­right; and in Spain, two new parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos, respectively on the radical left and on the right, conquered a substantial share of the electorate, transforming the traditional two-­party system into a multiparty structure. In Italy, too, a pattern of competition between two ideological blocs of left and right was called into question in 2013 by the emergence of the populist Five Star Movement. Overall, especially in Italy and partially in Greece, these dynamics have generated recurrent political instability, paralyzed governments, and allowed the entry into power of illiberal populist forces. In Portugal, by contrast, the gradual incorporation of new political forces was possible while preserving the stability of the party system, with the old parties of the right and left being able to maintain their roots in the electorate. At the same time, the new parties of the radical left were able to assimilate the norms of consensus and negotiation through parliamentary practice. As such, the Portuguese party system remained stable in the aftermath of the Great Recession, where practices

12  Tiago Fernandes

of consensus and coalition building between the center-­left and the radical left were even strengthened (Fernandes 2018b; Cancela, chapter 1; Sanches, chapter 2). Edalina Rodrigues Sanches, in chapter 2, compares the party systems of southern Europe. Strong parties, rooted in the electorate, with clear ideologies and programs offering voters real choices, are considered central elements of a high-­quality democracy. Sanches focuses mainly on the party systems’ levels of electoral volatility. The higher the volatility, which is to say, the more frequent the transfer of voters among party blocs, the lower the party system consolidation and parties’ ability to mobilize. As a result, political identities and regime governability are less stable, with the system also becoming more vulnerable to populist takeovers. Correspondingly, the quality of democracy declines. Contrary to theoretical expectations, there were lower volatility levels in the newer democracies of Portugal (10.9), Greece (14.3), and Spain (15.0) than in the older democracies of France (16.9) and Italy (17.7). But another most interesting finding is that Portugal and France stand out as not having great fluctuations in volatility or any peaks of high volatility during the years in question. Conversely, in Spain during the transition (1979–82) and the Great Recession (2011–15), in Italy during the collapse of the postwar party system (1992–94), and in Greece after 2008 there were huge volatility peaks. According to Sanches, this has contributed to the insulation of the Portuguese and French democratic regimes from the electoral success of populist parties, in contrast to other South European cases, such as Italy, which saw the sudden rise to power of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the 1990s. It is not so much the average level of volatility that is inimical to stable democratic party competition as the degree to which party systems are affected by sudden peaks of volatility, independently of having low or high volatility on average. High average volatility can be associated with major political and regime crisis, especially if the new forces entering parliaments and governments are populist, illiberal parties, as in Italy, but can also have no impact at all on the quality of democracy—as in France. Indeed, France, in spite of its high electoral volatility, has been a stable democracy and has not suffered any serious democratic crisis since the late 1960s. The main parties of the Fifth Republic (1958–present), the French Communist Party (PCF), the Socialist Party

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  13

(PS), the Union for French Democracy (UDF), and the Rally for the Republic (RPR) / Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), only started facing serious competition from the National Front (FN), an extremist and racist right-­wing party, in the 1990s. But the FN has never been able to reach government. It is true that the bipolar left-­right French party system faced a serious crisis in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2017, with the rapid decline of the socialists and the sudden victory of Emmanuel Macron’s new movement-­party, La République en Marche! But this political formation cannot be considered illiberal or antidemocratic. It espouses a mixed agenda of economic liberalization and social egalitarianism at both national and European levels, defending, for example, a renegotiation of the harsh terms of the European fiscal pact according to more equitable criteria. Volatility levels in Portugal have been the lowest of southern Europe. Even during the Great Recession, the party system remained stable, without major declines in the vote share of the founding parties of Portuguese democracy. Contrary to what happened in Greece, Italy, and Spain, the proausterity governments of the right were replaced, not by a new party, but by another founding party of Portuguese democracy, the socialists. In the 2015 elections the right-­wing coalition (Social Democratic Party [PSD] and CDS-­PP [Democratic and Social Center–People’s Party]) gave way to a socialist minority government, which pursued an egalitarian agenda and the reversal of many of the austerity policies previously implemented. Moreover, it did this on the basis of a parliamentary pact with the old radical left parties, the communists (Portuguese Communist Party [PCP]) and the Left Bloc (BE) (Fernandes 2018; Lisi 2016). In Spain, the Great Recession led to the end of the two-­party system established in the transition around the competition between the socialists of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and the center-­right Popular Party (PP). In 2015 two new parties emerged, the center-­right Ciudadanos and the radical left Podemos, garnering 35 percent of the vote. But in Italy and Greece sudden peaks of volatility have been associated not only with deep changes in the party-­system but also with major political crisis, especially because the new political formations directly influencing or reaching government have frequently been illiberal and populist. In Italy, the founding parties of the First Republic (1948–92)— Christian Democracy (DC), the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and

14  Tiago Fernandes

the Italian Socialist Party (PSI)—collapsed in 1992–94 because of corruption and illegal party financing scandals, making it easier for a new party of the right, Silvio Berlusconi’s populist Forza Italia (FI), to reach government in 1994. Also, during the Great Recession, after the failure of Mario Monti’s multiparty technocratic government, the traditional parties of the left and the right suffered such an erosion that, in March 2018, they were replaced in government by even harsher populist forces, an alliance between the Five Star Movement (M5S), led by the comedian Beppe Grillo, and the xenophobic Northern League (LN). In Greece, the highest levels of volatility and fragmentation of the whole democratic period were recorded in 2012, when the established parties, the center-­right New Democracy (ND) and the center-­left Pan-­Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), suffered huge losses. It was the radical left coalition SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left— Progressive Alliance), which had always had a very small representation since it entered the parliament in 1996, that mostly benefited from the decline of the old parties. SYRIZA conquered its space by advancing a program intent on reversing the austerity policies that had been negotiated between Greece, the International Monetary Fund, and the EU as a condition for financial help during the Great Recession. At the same time, when in government, SYRIZA reversed many of its previous policy commitments by adopting austerity policies, allying with the nationalist right, and resorting to top-­down plebiscitary consultations to justify its choices. The neofascist party Golden Dawn also rose electorally, receiving over 6 percent of the votes in the 2012 and 2015 legislative elections. The media also constitute a decisive arena through which to assess the quality of democracy. In modern societies, they are the vehicle through which the main national political issues and information reach citizens, providing, in this way, also a channel through which they are able to scrutinize the political process. The chapter by José Santana Pereira and Pedro Diniz de Sousa compares the origins and the forms that media systems have acquired in southern Europe. Greece (press) and Italy (television) were the countries where the media were most politicized and instrumentalized by governments and, therefore, where information pluralism was narrower. In Italy, this was achieved through a process called lottizzazione, which, in practice, reserved media access

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  15

for the more important parties (up until 1992 Christian Democracy, the Italian Socialist Party, and the Italian Communist Party), recurrently neglecting other political perspectives. A further decline in pluralism occurred during the Berlusconi governments of the 1990s and 2000s. Censorship levels got worse too, as it was the government that appointed the heads and editors of public news services. Moreover, the private channels owned by PM Berlusconi himself established a practice of regular consultation with the government to arrange the contents of television news programs. In Greece, private television networks have also been subject to informal political control, with the additional fact of frequent harassment and persecution of journalists. Spain represents a mixed case. There have been some informal limits on the freedom of press since the start of the democratic period, but these are mostly circumscribed to issues related to the royal family and the autonomy of the Basque Country. France and Portugal appear as the cases where freedom of information has been stronger and where the inauguration of private TV and radio outlets went together with the reinforcement of the capacity of regulatory institutions and of their independence in relation to governments (see also Santana Pereira 2015). The level of political participation and the existence of institutional opportunities for participation are other important dimensions of the quality of democracy analyzed in this book. Political participation of citizen groups and ordinary citizens is a sign of democratic vitality, frequently reinforcing democratic norms. But it is also a way to reach political equality, ensuring that all social interests are weighed equally by policymakers (Diamond and Morlino 2005, xvi; Fernandes et al. 2015). In this volume, we analyze two of these practices. One is electoral participation, the last theme of João Cancela’s chapter. Paradoxically, some of the findings contradict the idea that high participation is always good for the quality of democracy. In Greece and Italy electoral participation was higher, but this was due not only to long-­standing compulsory voting but also to vote buying and clientelist dynamics. However, as Cancela also shows, voter turnout has dropped to alarming levels in all five countries, following the similar trend in other European democracies (see also Cancela and Geys 2016). Participation in mechanisms of direct democracy, referenda and plebiscites, is studied by José Santana Pereira and Tiago Tibúrcio in

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chapter 4. Direct democracy is a procedure through which citizens are requested to vote on particular issues. These instances of voter participation can be called by the voters themselves, organized through movements or associations (abrogative referenda and initiatives), or by political decision-­makers (constitutional referenda and plebiscites). These instruments complement traditional electoral participation and are especially useful to introduce new issues into the public debate, ensuring that important political decisions are directly made by the people. In this sense, they can be seen as ways to improve the quality of democracy (Altman 2011, 2015). However, as shown by Santana Pereira and Tibúrcio, with the exception of Italy, popular referendum initiatives are not allowed in southern Europe, and the only forms of direct democracy allowed are those promoted by governments and parliamentary parties, like plebiscites and mandatory constitutional referenda. In Portugal and Greece, only plebi­ scites have been called, whereas Spain and France have had plebiscites and mandatory constitutional referenda (in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the 1970s, respectively). In Italy, a bottom-­up instrument, the recall referendum, has been widely used since the 1970s. But it also constitutes a limited form of popular participation, as it can be used only to repeal laws previously approved in the parliament, not to bring new issues to the political agenda. The reasons behind the use of direct democracy instruments in southern Europe have been mainly internal disputes between the political elites. It has also been common for the governments proposing the plebiscite to win the majority of votes—which was the case in Spain with the approval of the European Constitutional Treaty in 2005 and in Greece with the rejection of the terms of the international financial bailout of 2015. Further, these episodes of popular consultation have generally been underparticipated, especially because, in most cases, the ruling parties calling the referenda were internally divided on the issue and consequently were not able, or willing, to fully mobilize the electorate. Interesting examples of this were Spain’s referendum about its permanence in NATO in 1986 and Portugal’s referenda on abortion and regionalization in 1998. In chapter 5, Pedro T. Magalhães compares the institutions and practices of democracy at the subnational level (local and regional) and

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  17

shows how, despite a common heritage of both administrative centrali­ zation and political hegemony of local elites, it was possible to create democratic subnational systems of slightly higher quality in France and Portugal, and, partially, in Spain. In contrast, regional and local powers have been relatively weaker vis-­à-­vis the state and local social elites in Italy and Greece. These patterns remained more or less stable until the end of the Great Recession. In France, the decentralization reforms implemented in 1982–83 during François Mitterrand’s presidency were, for the first time in French history, able to change the Napoleonic model and to curb the informal power of local notables. Regions became elected bodies, like municipalities and departments, and prefects lost the power of supervising subnational authorities. In Portugal, open and autonomous local governments were established in the aftermath of the revolution of 1974–75, through the joint efforts of the new democratic center and radical left parties and popular movements. The remnants of the previous centralized administrative structures were kept in place or were only superficially renovated in Spain, Italy, and Greece. In Spain, in spite of the establishment of regional governments and autonomies with the return to democracy, the provinces (diputaciones provinciales), nonelected supramunicipal organs that had overlapping competences and that frequently interfered with elected authorities at local, municipal, and regional levels, were maintained, especially in Cata­ l­onia and the Basque Country. Greece reformed its subnational government in the 1980s with the introduction of thirteen nonelected regions, but these were created mainly for the purposes of accessing European structural funds. Prefectures were reformed into directly elected bodies only in 1993, but they acquired very limited powers and competences. Finally, in Italy, organs of regional representation were created in the 1970s, but they acquired mere technocratic-­administrative competences and remained as centralized as the national state. The third dimension of the quality of democracy considered in this book is the degree of social and economic egalitarianism (on this topic, see Roberts 1998). Edna Costa, in chapter 6, compares the varying patterns of women’s representation in political office (parliaments and governments) (on the divergent women’s participation in the labor market in the Iberian countries, see Fishman 2010; see also Sigman and Lindberg

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2015). Southern Europe was a regional laggard in reaching civic and political equality between men and women. In Italy and France, women’s suffrage was granted only after World War II, later than in most western European democracies. And the right to divorce was legalized only in the mid-­1970s in Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Women’s underrepresentation in political office was also high, in spite of their growing participation in the labor market and rising educational levels (Bermeo 2003; Costa, chapter 6; Htun 2003; Fishman 2010). But at the beginning of the twenty-­first century, southern European countries started to diverge in terms of women’s political representation. The rankings of democratic quality that we have observed in previous dimensions repeat themselves in this regard, with France and Spain, and partially Portugal, exhibiting a much better performance than Italy and Greece. Spain and Portugal present medium levels of female representation (25 percent and 40 percent), although Spain (2004, 2008) and France in particular (2012) have reached parity in government (over 40 percent), whereas Portugal, albeit with significant growth (29 percent in 2009), has not. Greece and Italy, in contrast, show very low feminization levels in both the parliament and the government. Finally, Rui Branco in chapter 7 analyzes the welfare states (e.g., unemployment benefits, pensions) and health systems of southern Europe. Some level of social and economic equality is essential to guarantee full political equality between citizens (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; Huber and Stephens 2012). This is even more crucial during the period in consideration here, as transformations of capitalism since the early 1970s (economic and financial globalization) have reduced the power of labor in relation to capital and generated a rise in inequality. Governments have gradually adopted capital-­friendly policies, like privatization, deregulation, and the reduction of investments in the welfare state. The major episode of this trend in southern Europe was the Great Recession (2007–14), which led the European Union, in order to finance the access to credit, to impose in the cases of Portugal and Greece a program of internal devaluation, through cuts in the welfare state and in civil servants’ wages, which severely restricted the capacity of these countries’ governments to intervene in the economy (Anderson 2009; Beramendi et al. 2015; della Porta et al. 2017, 5; Ferguson et al. 2010; Gourevitch 1986; Hollingsworth and Boyer 1998; Kahler and

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  19

Lake 2013; Kitschelt et al. 1999; Bermeo and Pontusson 2012; Bermeo and Bartels 2014; Fishman 2014; Hall and Lamont 2013; Roberts 2015; Diamandouros et al. 2006; Esping-­Andersen 1998). Still, wide variations in terms of welfare state development since the 1970s in the region are noteworthy. Contrary to theories of contemporary capitalism and democratization that posit convergence between countries toward policy moderation and retrenchment (Giner 1986, 40; Schmitter 2010), southern European democracies in some dimensions have been able to combine market economy and welfare state in virtuous ways. As Rui Branco shows, since 1985 social spending in southern Europe has converged toward the European average (17 percent of GDP in 2009). And if universal health systems, with the exception of France, were introduced only in the 1970s and 1980s, they received substantial public funding, with health care established as a citizenship right. France, Spain, and Portugal were the countries with higher levels of generosity in social protection and access to public goods. In France, a relatively egalitarian democratic capitalism has taken root, with social protection, health, and education services becoming practically universal. Portugal, especially when compared to Greece and Spain, shows that it is possible to gradually reduce inequality and sustain welfare enlargement even amid three economic crises and external financial rescue interventions. Conversely, in Italy and Greece public policies have been least effective in reducing social inequalities, and the generosity of the three main welfare programs (pensions, unemployment, and health benefits) has been the lowest. In sum, this book shows new patterns of democratic development and quality, which put France and, in some dimensions, Portugal ahead of Spain (except in women’s political representation and some aspects of the welfare state), and especially ahead of Greece and Italy. If one looks at other areas of democratic life, we also find a congruence with the patterns shown in the chapters of this book. In the arena of immigrant rights, Portugal and France have been more open and inclusive democracies. The extension of citizenship rights to immigrants and foreigners in southern Europe is a highly important issue, since, in the last decades, starting with the migration waves generated by decolonization, these societies have all become immigrant-­receiving countries and have had their ethnic and religious composition significantly altered.

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A major comparative study by Marc Howard analyzed the degree of openness and inclusion of the citizenship policies of European countries, according to criteria such as the norm of jus soli (the degree to which the children of noncitizens almost immediately acquire that country’s nationality), the minimum residency required for naturalization, and the possibility of naturalized immigrants to acquire dual citizenship. Howard concluded that, between the early 1980s and 2009, Greece, Spain, and Italy maintained restrictive policies, whereas Portugal became one of the most liberal countries in Europe, reaching similar levels to France (and Belgium, the UK, and Ireland) (Howard 2009, 27–28). Portugal’s contemporary inclusive policies started with the integration of the retornados, the half million people returning to the country during the decolonization of its African empire in 1974–75. Democratic Portugal enacted a policy of strong state activism to promote their integration through the creation of a special agency with vast financial funds and a new jus soli law instituted on July 24, 1975, granting citizenship to almost all people returning from its former African colonies. Although this law was reversed in 1981 and higher restrictions on citizenship and naturalization were imposed (e.g., the extension of residency requirement to ten years for naturalization), in the early 1990s integrative policies once again gained full steam. In 1998 immigrants were also granted the right to vote and to be elected in local elections. In 2006, another law put Portugal on par with the Netherlands, Sweden, and other “liberal” countries, granting citizenship to children of all immigrants almost at birth, even if the parents were irregular immigrants, and abolishing the positive discrimination in favor of immigrants from Portuguese-­speaking countries. The naturalization process was also simplified with the reduction of the residency requirement to six years (Howard 2009, 90; Marques et al. 1998, 16–18; Pena Pires, Delaunay, and Peixoto 2020). In terms of social and welfare rights for immigrants, Portugal has maintained inclusive and egalitarian policies. In 1998 it regularized employed immigrants, and in 2006 it created yet another activist state agency, the High Commission for the Integration of Immigrants. Work and residence visas were also easier to attain, with the presentation of a certificate by any immigrants’ rights civic organization (NGOs and trade unions) being sufficient. In 1991, a secretariat for multicultural

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  21

education was established to ensure that school programs consider issues of cultural diversity and respect for religious pluralism and to promote policies expanding Portuguese-­language schooling to immigrant children (Marques et al. 1998, 19). As a consequence, Portugal has had one of the highest naturalization rates for non-­EU citizens, above Spain, Italy, and France (Cook 2018; Jerónimo and Vink 2011; Pires 2012). Probably, this too explains the fact that Muslim populations have been well integrated, accepting the existing framework of state-­church relations and espousing a more liberal culture, without any influence of Islamist fundamentalism (Gould 2009). Until the 1970s, France was known for its principles of open jus soli, liberalism, and civic inclusion (Brubaker 1992), something that had contributed to a high naturalization rate. In 1972 and 1975, the right to vote and hold office in elections for union representatives and plant committees was granted to immigrants. But after the victory of the left (communists and socialists) in the 1977 municipal elections, in which immigrants’ activism in unions and civic associations was crucial, this tendency was reversed by right-­wing governments as a series of new laws inaugurated stronger restrictions. Family reunification was suspended for three years, and unemployment was presented as an effect of high immigration in the discourse of the right. But there was also some rapprochement between left and right when in 1984 a single-­residency permit and a renewable ten-­year visa were approved unanimously by the National Assembly. The center-­right has since moved toward an anti-­immigration posture, a turn that has also empowered the extreme-­right Front National. Although jus soli is still in place, citizenship for second-­generation immigrants is no longer automatic at age eighteen, having to be requested by descendants of immigrants between the ages of sixteen and twenty-­one (Schain 2005). Thus in France there has been a slight erosion of the tradition of openness, although, as we will show below, it is still a more inclusive country than Spain, Italy, or Greece. When the left gained power in 1998 (Lionel Jospin’s socialist government), it revised the most restrictive laws, declaring amnesties for immigrants with stable employment and legislating that immigrants’ expulsion could be authorized only by judicial authorities. Jospin also restored the double jus soli, simplified the process for automatic

22  Tiago Fernandes

citizenship at age eighteen years, and reduced the delay for spousal natu­ ral­ization (Howard 2009, 151–52). In Howard´s classification, Spain is also an intermediate case, right below Portugal and France but above Italy and Greece. On the one hand, Spain granted quite favorable rights of dual citizenship and natu­ ralization (only two years of residency required) to the descendants of Spanish emigrants and people originating from Latin America. On the other, immigrants coming from non-­Spanish cultural areas could not access citizenship by birth (jus soli), as in France and Portugal, and non-­ Hispanic immigrants could also lose their nationality more easily (e.g., if convicted of a crime). Still, the right to health care, education, and no deportation was maintained for all immigrants (Howard 2009, 115–16; López-­Pinto and Morlino 2005, 106; Solé 2004). Finally, Italy and Greece have established highly restrictive policies toward immigrants, especially as they clearly espouse discrimination between ethnic co-­nationals and other groups. In Italy, the center-­right government passed a Nationality Law in 1992, making it easier for foreigners of Italian descent to acquire citizenship after two years of residency. Simultaneously, laws became more restrictive for other immigrants, extending the residency requirement for naturalization from five to ten years and giving Italian nationality to immigrant children only if their parents had lived in the country uninterruptedly for eighteen years. This has resulted in a very low naturalization rate (Howard 2009, 105). Although the Turco-­Napolitano Law of 1986 facilitated immigrants’ access to social rights, most proposals of the left (socialists, communists) and of the labor unions to extend amnesty to irregular migrants and offer them health care and education failed, especially after the right-­wing parties (the neofascist Italian Social Movement—MSI—in the 1980s and the Lega Nord afterward) embraced xenophobic stances. Further reforms in 2002 by the Bossi-­Fini right-­wing government restricted even more the legal entry of economic immigrants, their possibilities of accessing regular work, and public funding for migrant associations (Solé 2004). And in 2009, a center-­right government, strongly influenced by the growth of the Lega Nord, criminalized illegal immigration (Perlmutter 2007, 2015). Greece, like Italy, also adopted a highly restrictive citizenship policy. Between the end of World War II and the transition to democracy in

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  23

1974, the state could arbitrarily withdraw Greek citizenship from individuals. Through this process, about fifty-­six thousand Greeks who had migrated to eastern Europe during the Greek civil war were deprived of citizenship (mostly communists, leftists, and ethnic minorities). In the democratic period, foreigners of Greek origin could easily achieve natu­ ralization, but not immigrants and ethnic minorities natural to Greece (Muslims, Roma, Macedonians, and non-­Christian Orthodox groups). For these, naturalization requirements have been highly demanding (ten years residency, a high naturalization fee). Since the mid-­1980s only fifteen thousand immigrants out of one million have become Greek citizens. The immigration laws approved in 1991 and 2001 continued these restrictive practices, without any vestige of civic and welfare integration, instead increasing legal penalties for undocumented immigrants (Howard 2009, 112–13; Solé 2004). This ethnic basis of exclusionary practices in Greece’s democratic regime has also affected the media. As shown by Santana Pereira and Diniz de Sousa in chapter 4, since 2007 the quality of the media deteriorated, as reports about the treatment and living conditions of the Macedonian community in the north of the country and other ethnic minorities were frequently censored. Greek was also imposed as the official language of the media. A S SE S SING RI VAL T HE ORIE S OF SO U T HERN EUR OPE AN DEMO CR AT I Z AT ION AND BE YOND

Why these patterns? What explains them? An old tradition in the social sciences claims that socioeconomic modernization (capitalist development and its correlates like industrialization and urbanization) is the prime causal factor associated not only with the transition to democracy but also with its stability and quality over time. A great many studies have shown a strong positive correlation between democracies’ resilience and socioeconomic development: higher per capita wealth and income leads to the growth of civil society mobilization, a middle class, and subsequent generalized welfare, which in turn tend to promote cooperation and to moderate and pacify political conflicts (Gould and Maggio 2007; Gunther, Diamandouros, and Puhle 1995; Lipset 1959; Przeworski et al. 2000; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992). In the case of southern

24  Tiago Fernandes

Europe, industrialization and urbanization occurred later than in northern Europe, with the capitalist mindset never really gaining acceptance in the attitudes of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes and generating a feeble working class. This fact is frequently invoked to explain the instability and frequent democratic collapse of the region (Arrighi 1985, 14; Gilmore 1982, 178–80; Giner 1986, 13–14; Malefakis 1995; Maravall 1997, 41; Poulantzas 1976; Sapelli 1995; Wallerstein 1985). But comparisons within the region do not support this line of reasoning. In fact, economic performance has been slightly higher for the democracies of lesser quality. For instance, in the period between 1950 and 1973, growth rates of real gross domestic product per capita were higher in Italy (5.0), a democracy of weaker quality ever since, than in France (4.0), a much better-­quality democratic regime. The same could be said of Greece, with a higher growth rate of the same indicator (6.2) when compared to Portugal and Spain (5.7 and 5.8, respectively) (Eichengreen 2007, 17). Looking just at the two Iberian democracies, Spain, since the mid-­ 1950s, embarked on a successful trajectory of economic modernization. The Spanish authoritarian regime was able to renew its ruling elites in the 1950s, and a new generation of technocrats led Spain to one of the highest growth rates of the world, opening the country to international markets, promoting industrialization, and forcing a complete disintegration of the autarchy and import substitution policies of the 1940s. By the mid-­ 1970s, Spain was the tenth economy of the world and a fully industrialized and urbanized society (Bosco 2005, 15; Maravall 1997, 41–42). But as important work by Robert Fishman (2011, 2019) has shown, it was Portugal, its much less developed Iberian neighbor, that reached higher levels of quality of democracy and citizen inclusion since the 1970s. A second set of theories emphasizes the role of international factors in democratization. In the case of southern Europe, an important geopolitical change was the process of European integration; France and Italy were founding members of the European Economic Community (EEC), participating in its creation in 1957. European institutions have since developed a network of shared sovereignty and co-­decision in a growing number of policy areas, as a way to encourage democratic cooperation and avoid war (Eichengreen 2007, 10–14; Moravcsik 1998). This objective was particularly important for France (and Germany) even

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  25

at the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, but also for Portugal, Spain, and Greece, where, by the 1960s, important segments of the economic and political elites of the authoritarian regimes and of the middle classes desired to follow the northern European countries’ model of combined prosperity and democracy (Castilho 2000; Diamandouros 1993; Pevehouse 2005; Pridham 1995; Royo and Manuel n.d.). There is some truth to this argument. If one compares southern Europe with other regions, like Latin America, it is clear that the condition that a country must be a democracy in order to join the European communities reinforced Iberian and Greek democratization processes. Furthermore, it is highly likely that European institutions have contributed to stabilize democracy in these countries by giving them international legitimacy and credibility through the channeling of substantial subsidies to finance infrastructures, services, and the welfare state and by pushing them to adopt particular egalitarian policies, like women’s representation quotas (Costa, chapter 6; Diamandouros et al. 2006; Fishman 2003; Huber and Stephens 2012; Pridham 1995; Schmitter 2003). Nonetheless, this line of reasoning is not sufficient to explain intraregional differences, as countries have had very different developmental paths since the 1960s and 1970s. France and Italy, founding members of the EU, have always exhibited wide differences in their democratic quality. Greece, Portugal, and Spain entered the EC at almost the same time (Greece in 1981; the Iberian countries in 1986) but have also displayed significant differences. As this volume shows, differences have persisted, confirming previous research on subjects such as patterns of elite recruitment, adoption of European law by national judicial systems, and levels of technocratic policymaking. Moreover, under the impact of a common European integration one should have seen institutional convergence between all these countries over time. But that has not been the case (Fishman 2003; Pridham 1990, 1995; Ross and Martin 2006; Sánchez-­Cuenca 2014, 150; Schmitter 2003, 2006; Almeida, Pinto, and Bermeo 2003, 217; Teixeira and Pinto 2002; Vink 2012). A third set of arguments emphasizes the duration of democracy as a causal factor. Older democracies would tend to have higher quality, to be more inclusive, participatory, and egalitarian, as the effects of citizens’ electoral and civic political mobilization accumulated over time

26  Tiago Fernandes

(Gerring, Thacker, and Alfaro 2012). But the findings in this book also contradict this reasoning. For instance, there is much lower democratic quality of the electoral process in Greece and Italy, a new and an old democracy respectively, where vote purchasing and manipulation of the basic rules of political competition (e.g., electoral system) for immediate political gains have been common practice (Cancela, chapter 1; Sanches, chapter 2). Both old and new democracies can decay and lose quality (Bermeo 2016; Levitsky and Way 2010; Lührmann et al. 2020). Conversely, new democracies can achieve unexpected levels of higher quality considering their short life span, as the cases of Portugal and Spain show. The worldwide expansion of democracies since 1974 created an international environment particularly favorable to democratization, something that explains the fact that countries with highly unfavorable internal conditions, like low socioeconomic development, a weak state, or a recent civil war, have successfully democratized (Gunitsky 2017; Huntington 1991; Markoff 1996; Levitsky and Way 2010). Still, the fact that the third wave of democratization started in southern Europe (Portugal and Greece in 1974, Spain in 1975–77) questions the validity of this argument, since these countries could not have been influenced by any previous examples of recent democratization or have suffered any diffusion effect. The causes of southern European patterns of democratic quality must clearly be internal (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986). In fact, it was Portugal and Spain that influenced and provided models for emulation to later third-­wave democratizations, especially of Latin America and eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s (Weyland 2015). As Markoff argued (1996, 20), although short-­term episodes of transition to democracy can eventually be explained by processes of diffusion and emulation intrinsic to the wave of democratization in which they occur, long-­run patterns of democratic persistence and quality, which are the object of this book, are much less explained by those processes and tend be much more based on internal structural causes. A third set of explanations focuses on institutions, looking at the impact of legacies inherited from previous nondemocratic regimes, or at the particular institutional configuration of the democratic regimes themselves. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan argued that the particular traits of semi-­institutionalized opposition, organizational and media pluralism, and rule of law, typical of the authoritarian regimes of Portugal and

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  27

Spain, largely explained the higher success of their democracies when compared to democracies born out of post-­totalitarian (eastern Europe) or sultanistic (Latin America, Africa, Asia) regimes (Linz 1964, 1973; Linz and Stepan 1996, 139–41; see also Riley and Fernández 2014). This argument might explain the variation between southern Europe and other regions. But it is also not enough to explain patterns within southern Europe. For instance, France and Portugal are presented in this volume as high-­quality democracies, but the former succeeded one of the shortest authoritarian regimes of the region (Vichy, 1940–44), whereas the latter came after one of the most long-­lived dictatorships of the twentieth century (Schmitter 1999). Furthermore, both Spain and Portugal have shared the traits of the Linzian authoritarian regime, while diverging in crucial dimensions of the quality of their subsequent democracies, with Portugal showing more robust civic engagement (Fernandes 2014b) and media pluralism (Santana Pereira and Diniz de Sousa, chapter 4), as well as less electoral clientelism (Cancela, chapter 1). The institutional configuration of democratic regimes themselves can also affect their quality. For instance, it has been argued that the traits of corporatist and consensual democracies (decentralization and federalism, strong parliamentarism, institutions for the regular negotiation between representative interest associations of business and labor, and highly proportional and open electoral systems) allow not only for a wider inclusion and participation of popular interests but also for a higher egalitarianism of social and economic policies (Lijphart 1999; Schmitter 1981; Maravall 1997; for a critique, see Coppedge 2018 and Mainwaring 2001). Again, this argument fails to explain the different patterns of democratic quality in southern Europe. France, Portugal, and Greece are typical cases of unitary and centralized states, whereas Italy and Spain fall within the regionalized and decentralized model (Bruneau et al. 2001). As Pedro T. Magalhães shows in chapter 5, it was in France and Portugal that, after the 1960s–’70s cycle of protest, urban social movements were able to achieve the establishment of a more open and participatory local democracy. The level of parliamentarism also fails to distinguish the levels of quality of democracy in southern Europe. With the exception of France, all the remaining democracies (including Portugal, which started as semipresidential, but where parliament became

28  Tiago Fernandes

the central institution of the regime from the mid-­1980s onward) have been parliamentary (Morlino 1998, 69; Pridham 1990, 5–6). Italy is a paradoxical case in this regard, as it exhibits one of the lowest levels of democratic quality, but parliamentary activity has predominated in the lawmaking process there since the 1950s, with MPs enjoying a strongly autonomous political role. Parliament in Italy also elected the president of the Republic and a third of the members of the Constitutional Court, and regularly consulted with interest groups during the legislative processes and for policy design. But it was also in Italy that clientelism was rampant and public policies were more socially skewed and unequal (LaPalombara 1964, 107–10, 222–23; Morlino 1998). The same could be said of neocorporatist institutions (Schmitter 1995). Although research has shown their positive impact in controlling inflation and enhancing economic competitiveness in southern Europe (Royo 2002), they have failed to contribute to a higher quality of democracy. Italy always had the most encompassing and dense union confederations and employers’ organizations, with regular access to the state. A full-­fledged corporatist system of tripartite negotiations became institutionalized in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a result of the support of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to the Christian Democracy (DC) governments. But it was also in this period that austerity, antilabor policies, and wage decline were the harshest (Golden 1986, 289). Similarly, the adoption of female representation quotas was not a factor in democratization, since the increase in the number of women in political office preceded the adoption of quotas. Rather, quotas were a likely consequence of women entering into politics, which was mainly explained by civic and partisan dynamics. A clear example of this was Spain, showing an increase of almost 20 percent in the number of elected women MPs in the three elections preceding the adoption of quotas (Costa, chapter 6). Finally, a fourth set of theories looks at legacies of critical junctures of regime transformation and transition. These theories are of two types, one emphasizing the role of elites and the other stressing the role of popular mobilization. Elite-­based theories have argued that successful democratization is possible only when elites are in control of the transition process, be it in situations when authoritarian elites fully guide the transition or when they negotiate it with segments of the opposition. The crucial

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  29

factor here is the need to ensure elite economic and political survival in the emerging democracy. If this fails to happen, given elite control of the means of state coercion, the transition process can be interrupted. This also implies either pact making and moderation of both popular mobilization and opposition demands during the regime transition, or the presence of a strong authoritarian successor/conservative party at the disposal of the authoritarian elite, able to successfully win democratic elections in contexts of widespread popular mobilization (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Colomer 1998; Diamandouros 1997; Encarnacion 2003; Gunther, Diamandouros, and Puhle 1995; Linz 1997; Linz and Stepan 1996; Loxton 2018; Valenzuela 1988; Mainwaring and Pérez-­Liñán 2013; Slater 2012; Slater and Wong 2013; Ziblatt 2017). The findings in this book contradict these assertions. It was in the countries where pact making between elites was common and conservative and successor authoritarian parties were stronger during the cycle of protest of the 1960s and 1970s that democracies of a lower quality were established in the long run. It was in Italy that after World War II and the 1990s politics was dominated by a strong conservative party, the DC. Also, in Italy and Greece, the left and the most important elements of the majority of the social movement sector were quite moderate and willing to make pacts. In Italy, for example, the cycle of protest of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to a compromise between the center-­right (the DC) and the Communist Party and its unions. The Greek 1974 transition was also in the hands of a somewhat successor party (the rightist ND—New Democracy), which gathered the conservative elites that had ruled during the semidemocratic regime of the whole postwar period before the 1967 coup. And there is Spain, the clearest case of an authoritarian successor conservative party guiding the transition, the Francoist moderates of the Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), which later joined the Francoist hard-­liners of the Popular Alliance (AP) in forming the Popular Party (PP). Strong authoritarian successor parties of a neofascist type also thrived in Italy (the MSI) and in Spain (the New Force [FN]), but they were clearly illiberal parties, only partially accepting the democratic rules of the game, what Juan Linz (1978) once labeled a semiloyal opposition. Conversely, in Portugal and France, countries that became higher-­ quality democracies, there were no authoritarian successor parties on the

30  Tiago Fernandes

right in the 1960s–’70s. In France, the postwar center-­right parties had been notoriously weak (Sanches, chapter 2). And the main democratic Portuguese center-­right party, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), was a totally new organization, being founded in 1974 by liberal and social democratic sectors of the opposition to the dictatorship and not by the previous elites of the authoritarian single party, the National Union/ National Popular Action (UN/ANP). In this period, these countries were marked by deep social and institutional ruptures with the past brought by highly contentious and autonomous social movements allied with center and leftist parties making radical demands. And it was here that, for instance, in the long run, party systems became more institutionalized and social and economic policies more equitable. Thus we tend to agree with previous arguments that in democracies, the price to pay for pacts and strong authoritarian successor parties is elite collusion, scarcely competitive elections, and inequality and corruption (Karl 1990; Flores-­Macias 2018). The other set of arguments within the critical junctures approach claims that the roots of democratic quality lie in a fast and deep rupture with the institutional and social structures of domination inherited from the past during moments of revolutionary change (Fishman 2011, 2017, 2019; della Porta 2014; Moore 1966; Rustow 1970; Tilly, McAdam, and Giugni 1998; Tilly 2004; Wood 2005). According to Robert Fishman (2011, 2017, 2019), in his important body of work comparing democratic Portugal and Spain, social revolutions are extreme instances of this pattern, where high levels of social protest and the egalitarian agendas of revolutionary leaderships in control of the state lead to a rapid transformation of institutions and repressive traditional social hierarchies (class, status). In the long run, democracies born out of revolution will be more inclusive of the interests and voices of the underprivileged, will be more participatory, and will have more egalitarian welfare states (Fishman 2011, 2019; see also Bermeo 1986). This argument is partially confirmed by our research. Portugal, in the aftermath of the revolution of 1974–75, became a more inclusive democracy than Spain, the very model of elite-­guided transition. As Fishman argues, in Portugal, political equality was taken more seriously, the new party elites were more open to the excluded and to popular interests and demands, and the pattern of policymaking in several arenas

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  31

rapidly became more egalitarian (e.g., employment, housing, and labor market). Civil societies also became stronger and more participatory in Portugal than in Spain (Bermeo 1983, 1986; Fernandes et al. 2015; della Porta et al. 2018). Furthermore, in post-­1970s Greece and in Italy, the continuity of institutions and policies of the past led to a weaker quality of their democracies, with party elites on both left and right deepening preexisting models of political clientelism. In Portugal, instead, programmatic parties and a competitive party system predominated after the revolution (Sanches, chapter 2). At the same time, the occurrence of social revolution is an insufficient factor to explain the patterns of democratic quality shown in this book. Social revolution is a too-­idiosyncratic model, as Portugal constitutes the only case. It cannot account for the patterns found in France, where a high-­quality and inclusive democracy was established after the 1960s and 1970s in the absence of social revolution—in fact, after the failure of the “revolution” of May 1968 (Tarrow 1993); or in Spain, which is the model of pacted transition to democracy, but where the quality of democracy is, in some arenas, higher than in Portugal (e.g., women’s political representation, universalism of the welfare state) and overall better than in Greece and Italy. As Sara Watson (2015) showed, from 1982 to the mid-­1990s, Spanish socialist governments did show opening to the demands of unions and social movements and developed a partially egalitarian agenda in the labor market. Moreover, the role of civil society and of popular mobilization in pushing the Spanish authoritarian regime into democracy was crucial, as the important work of Víctor Pérez-­Díaz (1993) has shown (see also Collier 1999 and Tarrow 1995). In Portugal itself, the impact of the revolution has not produced straightforward and immediate inclusiveness and equality. For instance, until 1982 right-­wing parties fully rejected the 1976 Constitution, considering it too left-­wing, and kept trying to reverse it through a popular referendum (Santana Pereira and Tibúrcio, chapter 3). In fact, the cultural consensus on the revolution as a positive founding moment of Portuguese democracy has never been uniform (Raimundo and Dias 2020). A clear case was the right-­wing coalition government led by PM Pedro Passos Coelho during the Great Recession (2011–15), which implemented even harsher neoliberal policies than the ones proposed by the Troika financing the Portuguese bailout (the European Central Bank,

32  Tiago Fernandes

the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund). This government publicly rejected the legacy of the revolution, as exemplified by their plans to revise again the 1976 Constitution, in which the principles of equal rights and social protection were enshrined (della Porta et al. 2017). Partially restrictive legislation on immigration also prevailed until the early 1990s (Cook 2018, 11; Pires 2012). Finally, data on protest cycles for the period 2000–2019 has showed low levels of responsiveness and openness of the state to popular demands. Most protest events, in both Portugal and Spain, did not result in immediate negotiations between the target of the protest and the protesters (95.4 percent and 93.4 percent, respectively). In fact, the percentage of events that culminated in negotiations was slightly higher in Spain (6.6 percent) than in Portugal (4.6 percent) (Fernandes et al. 2020). T HE IMPAC T OF L E G ACIE S F R OM T HE NONDEMO CR AT IC PA S T ON CI VIL SO CIE T Y AND ON PR O G RE S SI VE C OAL IT IONS

The research presented in this book confirms the role of civil society mobilization during junctures of regime transformation as a crucial causal factor in generating long-­run patterns of democratic quality (Bermeo 1997; Bernhard and Jung 2017; Bernhard, Fernandes, and Branco 2017; Bernhard 2020; Fishman 2017; della Porta 2014). For instance, the emergence of a strong local grassroots civil society during the Portuguese revolution prevented the structuring of rural clientelist networks inherited from the previous regime (Magalhães, chapter 5; Fernandes and Branco 2017); where civil society was robust, electoral volatility was lower, and party and party-­system institutionalization stronger (Sanches, chapter 2); journalists’ capacity for self-­organization in unions and newsroom committees during the Portuguese revolution led to their greater professionalization, which also contributed to greater media pluralism and impartiality in Portugal (Santana Pereira and Diniz de Sousa, chapter 4); strong unions, with close links to socialist parties and a wide mass base, favored electoral participation, whereas weak unions contributed to low turnout and to declining levels of trust in institutions and satisfaction with democracy (Cancela, chapter 1; Fernandes et al. 2019a, 2019b); and more open and inclusive immigration laws in Portugal have been the result of the coordinated

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  33

action of immigrant associations, trade unions, and the Catholic Church and their allies in political parties (Cook 2018, 11). But it is also necessary to look more closely at the specific contextual conditions through which civil society is able to introduce deep transformative dynamics in institutions, policies, and society during cycles of protest. In southern Europe, one such condition was through the formation of what we call progressive coalitions. These were temporary, but wide, alliances of new and old social movements (e.g., unions, religious, student, and neighborhood organizations) with parties of the center-­ left (socialists) and radical left (communists), which shared an egalitarian ideological framework and were committed to a deep and radical transformation of society and institutions (Fernandes and Branco 2017; Fernandes 2018a, 2018b). If a wide and robust progressive coalition was formed during the cycle of protest, the higher would be the quality of democracy in the long run. In southern Europe, a region historically characterized by a divided left and polarized civil society, the cycle of protest of the 1960s and 1970s was a critical juncture where this legacy could also be overcome. In some countries, like France and Portugal, such coalitions were strong, making democracy, in the long run, more resilient, egalitarian, and inclusive. In Spain they were partially successful, but, especially in Greece and Italy, the formation of progressive coalitions failed, with long-­run negative consequences for the quality of democracy. As Edna Costa shows in chapter 6, Spain successfully broke with a strong tradition of female exclusion, unlike Italy, because of strong pressure from women’s movements allied to the PSOE. In Portugal and France, the welfare state became more universalist, following alliances between center-­left and radical left parties with neighborhood movements, unions, and other civil society organizations (Branco, chapter 7). And as Pedro T. Magalhães demonstrates in chapter 5, following Fernandes and Branco (2017), during the civic mobilization of the 1960s and ’70s, the various movements struggling for local democracy—neighborhood associations, autonomist movements, self-­organized Catholic groups—were incorporated into broad electoral fronts, together with socialist, communist, and small centrist parties, establishing a common political program. Having risen to power, their governments instituted reforms of deep democratization of the local and/or regional administrations. In France,

34  Tiago Fernandes

it was Michel Rocard’s “second left” and associated local movements that integrated the joint platform of trade unions, socialists (French Section of the Workers’ International [SFIO]/PS [Socialist Party]), and communists (PCF) led by François Mitterrand. In Portugal, it was the MDP/CDE (Portuguese Democratic Movement / Democratic Electoral Commissions), a front-­type organization of communists, socialists, social democrats, and progressive Catholics, that, following the end of the dictatorship in April 25, 1974, negotiated with the revolutionary military the composition of the provisional government and also took control of the majority of the municipalities, working alongside neighborhood organizations to overcome the powerful centralist legacy of the dictatorship. Conversely, in Italy and Greece similar coalitions failed to form (Fernandes, Conclusion). Progressive coalitions have a positive impact on the quality of democracy through three causal mechanisms. First, they contribute to the political legitimacy and legal recognition of grassroots popular civil society organizations and their demands. As a result, the state and its institutions become more tolerant of protest, such as in styles of policing, which become less repressive, and civic and social rights become more fully established in constitutions and laws. Second, they generate institutional embeddedness between civil society and the state at both local and national levels, allowing popular civil society to more easily influence and shape policymaking (Bernhard, Fernandes, and Branco 2017; della Porta et al. 2018). Finally, they change the repertoires of collective action of both social movements and political parties in ways that facilitate the future formation of new progressive coalitions. As such, alliances between newly emerging popular social movements and left parties during electoral contests and protest cycles become an accepted and normal way of doing politics during subsequent critical junctures (Fernandes 2014a, 2014b; della Porta et al. 2018). The literature has, of course, pointed out the importance of coalitions of the sort analyzed in this book as a condition for the quality of democracy, what Terry Karl (2014, 126–27) has called “fairness coalitions.” By their sheer strength and unity at specific moments in time, they are able to force elites to concede reforms and are ultimately able to reach state power, which they then use to implement egalitarian policies and inclusionary institutional reforms (Bermeo and Yashar 2016;

Patterns of Democratic Quality in Southern Europe  35

Fishman 2004; Goodwin 2012, 291–92; Roberts 1998; Desai 2007; Sandbrook et al. 2007; Sanders 1999; Watson 2015; Wilson 1999, 1–15). But we go beyond existing studies on the relationship between coali­ tions and democracy. First, for these alliances to be really transforma­ tive, it is necessary that the disparate groups that constitute the coalition share a common cultural and ideological framework that puts the notion of a deep transformation of social and economic structures of domination in a central place. It is not enough to change institutions and modes of policymaking; it is society itself, and its power structures, that must change. In the 1960s and 1970s, this ideological cement was provided by a specific version of revolutionary socialism, located between ameliorative social democracy and revolutionary Leninism. As Juan Linz (1979a, 192) observed, this affected mainly the socialist parties of southern Europe. Facing powerful communist parties and radical left-­Catholic movements, socialists thought it plausible to form a broader left alliance, an “alternative that would be closer to true socialism” than the northern European social democracy. Moreover, in the 1960s and ’70s, Stalinism, revolutionary Leninism, and orthodox communism in general were in serious crisis, as socialist alternatives had emerged within the left (Maoism, Gramscianism, Eurocommunism, Progressive Catholicism, etc.), thus making a revolutionary Marxist project more compatible with liberal democracy (Linz 1979a, 197; Stepan 1986, 83–84; Fishman 2018). Second, from an organizational point of view, this type of coalition between parties and civil society is fluid, unstable, and episodic. Its impact is mainly felt at specific, critical moments in time, such as cycles of protest or particular electoral cycles. In this sense, this type of coalition is quite different from the traditional social democratic model, which posits that the basis for a high-­quality democracy rests on coherent and strongly institutionalized national-­level civil society organizations and a united left under a single and mass-­based social democratic party (Desai 2007; Esping-­Andersen 1985, 1998; Orloff 1993; Skocpol 2003; Watson 2015). Finally, we show in the Conclusion to this book that legacies inherited from the nondemocratic past determined the formation of progressive coalitions (on legacies, see Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010; Ekiert and Hanson 2003; Simpser, Slater, and Wittenberg 2018). This is the last part of our argument. The stronger the presence of an antidemocratic

36  Tiago Fernandes

right in the state apparatus, regime institutions, the party system, and civil society, the more repressive and violent was its reaction to the cycle of protest of the 1960s and ’70s, for instance, through the use of the state’s coercive instruments and the promotion of actions like terrorist bombings and assassinations (see della Porta 1995 for the cases of Italy and Germany). This, in turn, would generate a cycle of violence in which sectors of the left and of new social movements also became involved, making progressive alliances much more difficult, as both the established leftist parties and labor unions would now seek to enter agreements with the established parties of the right to protect the regime against the extremes while at the same time cutting their ties with popular movements. This meant that the preexisting clientelist and centralized political systems would not be reformed, negatively affecting the quality of democracy in the long run. Conversely, an absence of the extreme right during the 1960s and ’70s, as a result of either a legacy inherited from the past (France) or wide purges of the state and the institutional apparatus carried out during the cycle of protest itself (Portugal), was a precondition for the formation of progressive coalitions (see also Akturk 2007 on eastern European democracies). An analysis of how these factors played out and interacted in order to produce the varying outcomes of democratic quality of the southern European democracies will be further developed in the concluding chapter. REF ERENCE S Akturk, Sener. 2007. “Explaining the Variation in Political Regime Outcomes after Communism: Displacement of the Communist Era Nomenklatura and Democratization.” Newsletter of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies—University of California, Berkeley 24 (2): 5–12. Almeida, Pedro Tavares de. 1991. Eleições e caciquismo no Portugal Oitocentista (1868–1890). Lisbon: Difel. Almeida, Pedro Tavares de, António Costa Pinto, and Nancy Bermeo, eds. 2003. Who Governs Southern Europe? Regime Change and Ministerial Recruitment, 1850–2000. London: Frank Cass. Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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———. 1979b. “Legislatures in Organic Statist Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Spain.” In Legislatures in Development: Dynamics of Change in New and Old States, edited by Joel Smith and Lloyd D. Musolf, 88–124. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1997. “El liderazgo inovador en la transición a la democracia y en una nueva democracia.” In Política y gobierno en España, edited by Manuel Alcantara and Antónia Martinez, 63–118. Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch. Linz, Juan, and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-­communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.” American Political Science Review 53 (1): 69–105. Lisi, Marco. 2016. “U-­Turn: The Portuguese Radical Left from Marginality to Government Support.” South European Society and Politics 21 (4): 541–60. López-­Pinto, Rafael, and Leonardo Morlino. 2005. “Italy and Spain.” In Assessing the Quality of Democracy, edited by Larry Diamond and Le­onardo Morlino, 85–122. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Loxton, James. 2018. “Introduction: Authoritarian Successor Parties Worldwide.” In Life after Dictatorship: Authoritarian Successor Parties Worldwide, edited by James Loxton and Scott Mainwaring, 1–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lührmann, Anna Seraphine Maerz, Sandra Grahn, Lisa Gastaldi, Sebastian Hellmeier, Nazifa Alizada, Garry Hindle, and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2020. Autocratization Surges—Resistance Grows. V-­Dem Democracy Report 2020, V-­Dem Institute—University of Gothenburg. https://​v​-dem​.net​ /documents​/14​/dr​_2020​_dqumD5e​.pdf. Mainwaring, Scott. 2001. “Two Models of Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 12 (3): 170–75. Mainwaring, Scott, and Aníbal S. Pérez-­Liñán. 2013. Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mainwaring, Scott, and Timothy R. Scully, eds. 2010. Democratic Governance in Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Malefakis, Edward. 1995. “The Political and Socioeconomic Contours of Southern European History.” In The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective, edited by Richard Gunther, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, and Hans Jürgen Puhle, 33–76. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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50  Tiago Fernandes

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ONE

Elections Institutional Frameworks and Electoral Participation João Cancela

The holding of free, fair, and regular elections is a central criterion of various contemporary conceptions of democracy, from the minimalist (Schumpeter 2006) to the most demanding (O’Donnell 2001). The importance of elections is also evident in the conceptual framework of the Varieties of Democracy (V-­Dem) Project, wherein the “electoral democracy” model, defined by the existence of competitive elections, is presented as a minimum basis from which more demanding conceptions of democracy—liberal, participatory, deliberative, majoritarian, and egalitarian—arise (Coppedge and Gerring 2011). Thus it is generally accepted that if holding elections is not sufficient to classify a regime as a democracy, it constitutes nevertheless a necessary condition. If we take elections as the defining feature in considering a regime as minimally democratic, the five southern European countries are clearly democracies. Taking as an observation point the year 2014, all the 55

56  João Cancela

countries analyzed here have had uninterrupted free and fair electoral acts for decades. If we take into account elections for constituent assemblies, the longest democratic series is that of France (1945), followed by Italy (1946), Greece (1974), Portugal (1975), and Spain (1977). Over the last few decades, debates over the comparison of “real-­ existing democracies” (Schmitter 2011) have opposed a “dichotomous” conception of democracy to one rooted in “degreeism” (Collier and Adcock 1999). Even if a binary opposition between democracy and authoritarianism might bring analytical leverage to the study of the causes and consequences of democratization (Alvarez et al. 1996; Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland 2009), the classification of political regimes is not exhausted by the existence or absence of free elections (Fishman 2016). This chapter seeks to make use of the wealth of information collected and processed in the V-­Dem database to examine the quality of democracy in the five countries under consideration, with a focus on the institutions and processes that characterize the selection of political representatives. With that goal in mind, this chapter seeks to explain the variations in the formal and procedural and participatory dynamics of southern European elections. The first group of variables concerns the legal norms governing electoral procedures. Elections in southern Europe have differed substantively as to the system of converting votes into mandates, the voting requirements, and the minimum age for exercising them. The second group also covers institutions, albeit of a different nature. In fact, the institutional dimension is not restricted to normative frameworks but encompasses the existence of practices that, despite their informal and extralegal nature, can directly or indirectly influence the various candidates’ chances of success and, consequently, election results. Thus variations in “informal institutions” (Helmke and Levitsky 2004) are also addressed in this chapter. The third group concerns levels of electoral participation. Having presented the evolution of electoral participation in the five countries, we then examine it in a broader comparative framework and identify potential explanatory variables for its decline. EL E C T IONS IN T HE L IT ER AT URE ON SO U T HERN EUR OPE

A first generation of studies on Portuguese, Greek, and Spanish de­ mocratization emphasized the importance of elections as barometers

Elections 57

of the adherence to democratic values by the public and of the consolidation of national party systems (Bermeo 1987; Pridham 1990; Gunther, Diamandouros, and Puhle 1995). In this perspective, elections were understood, not just as a product of democratization processes, but also as critical moments in which democratic viability was put to the test and in which some of the fundamental features of the subsequent regime were outlined. This applied in particular to “founding” elections, which were crucial for the creation of “agendas, actors, organizations,” and, most importantly, regime legitimacy (Linz and Stepan 1996, 100). The literature on the Portuguese transition clearly illustrates the importance given to the first democratic elections. Taking the outcome of the founding elections in Spain and Portugal (center-­right vs. center-­left victory), Nancy Bermeo (1987) argued that these were the product of differences in the transition mode (reform vs. rupture), social structure (weakness of the bourgeoisie in Portugal compared to Spain), and the relative strength of the semiopposition under authoritarianism and in the immediately subsequent period (greater in Spain than Portugal) (see also Fernandes 2006, 2007). More specifically, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996, 128) considered that the extremely high levels of participation in the 1975 Portuguese Constituent Assembly elections contributed decisively to the subsequent consolidation of democracy. They also underlined the prefer­ ences expressed in these elections, where almost three-­quarters of voters chose the Socialist Party, the Social Democratic Party, or the Democratic Social Center, all proponents of liberal democracy. The combination of high levels of voter turnout and the majority of votes obtained by these three parties was interpreted by Linz and Stepan as an expression of popular adherence to the ideals of liberal democracy, a fact that in turn also shaped the perceptions and strategies of the various actors involved in the democ­ ratization process and, consequently, the nature of the subsequent regime. Naturally, the analysis of electoral results and their long-­term consequences for southern European democracies was not limited to the found­ing elections. A comparative history of elections in the five countries enables us to establish differences and similarities within the region. For instance, in a retrospective analysis of elections for the period 1970–90, Richard Gunther (2004, 81), labeled the Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish cases as instances of “modern” party systems, as opposed to the Italian case, which remained structured by a typically postwar model of socioeconomic left-­right cleavages.

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The literature based on the analysis of aggregate electoral results has been complemented by the incorporation of individual-­level data gath­ered in public opinion surveys. This has contributed to exhaustive research on the determinants of voting and participation at a micro level (Bellucci 1984; Freire and Lobo 2005), using cases from southern Europe to test theoretical models developed from other contexts (Lewis-­ Beck and Nadeau 2012). In this respect, there is no strong evidence of a specific southern European political culture. Rather, patterns of political attitudes and behavior in this region are similar to those prevailing in other Continental contexts (Torcal and Magalhães 2009). DATA DE SCRIP T ION AND ANALY SIS

Although elections in southern Europe have been a recurrent research object, there is still an absence of comparative work focusing on the insti­ tutional and procedural characteristics of electoral acts. The research re­ ported here draws on a subset of data from the V-­Dem Project covering the five southern European countries from 1968 to 2014. The period covers sixty-­four legislative elections in the five countries:1 eleven in France, thirteen in Italy, fifteen in Greece,2 fourteen in Portugal, and eleven in Spain. Figure 1.1 displays an electoral chronology, indicating the proportion of votes obtained by the most-­voted party (or coalition) in each election. An examination of the multiple V-­Dem indicators on elections shows a number of interesting variations. As mentioned in the introduction, these are grouped into three analytical categories, which are ­explored in the following sections: formal institutions, informal institutions, and electoral participation dynamics. Variation in Formal Institutional Configurations

This section deals with the formal institutional configurations that structure the way elections are conducted. First, the analysis focuses on the electoral system in a narrow sense—the conversion of votes into mandates. The basic distinction regarding electoral systems is the “principle of representation” (Nohlen 1984) that they follow, being either majoritarian or proportional. Each of these principles corresponds to various

○ PASOK - 43.8%

● PSOE - 39.6%● PP - 38,8%

● PL - 46.8%

○ PD - 29.5%

● PSD - 38,7%

○ PS - 36,6%

● PP - 44.6%

○ PSOE - 43.9%

● ND - 29.7%

● ND - 18.9%

● ND - 41.8%

○ PSOE - 42.6%

○ PSOE - 44.1% ○ PSOE - 38.8% ● PP - 44.5%

○ PSOE - 48.1%

● UCD - 34.8%

● UCD - 34.4%

● ND - 46.9%

○ PSF - 40.9%

○ PASOK - 41.5% ● ND - 45.4% ○ PASOK - 43.9%

○ PASOK - 46.9%

● ND - 46.2%

○ PASOK - 48.1%

○ PASOK - 48.1% ● ND - 44.3%

● ND - 41.8%

● ND - 54.4%

● PSD - 40,2%

● FI- 45.4%○ L'U - 49.8%

○ L'U - 45.4%

● FI- 42.8%

● DC - 29.7%

● DC - 34.3%

● DC - 32.9%

● DC - 38.3%

● DC - 38.7%

● PSD - 29,9%

2010

● UMP - 46.4%

● UMP - 47.3%

○ PS - 44,1% ○ PS - 45%

○ PS - 43,8%

● PSD - 50,6%

● PSD - 50,2%

2000

○ PSF - 38.2%

● RPR - 29%

○ PSF - 45.7%

○ PS - 36,1%

● AD - 42,5%

○ PS - 34,9%

1990

○ PSF - 31%

○ PSF - 49.3%

○ PS - 37,9%● AD - 44,9%

● DC - 38.7%

● DC - 39.1%

1980

● RPR - 26.1%

● UDR - 44.7%

● UDR - 46.4%

1970

FIGURE 1.1.  Electoral chronology in southern Europe (1968–2014). Sources: For France, Ministère de l’Intérieur (2016) and Nohlen and Stöver (2010); for Portugal, Comissão Nacional de Eleições (2016); for Spain, Dirección General de Política Interior (2016); for Greece, Ministry of the Interior (2016) and Pantelis, Koutsoubinas, and Gera­petrit (2010); for Italy, Ministero dell’ Interno (2016).

Spain

Greece

Italy

Portugal

France

1960

60  João Cancela

methods of electing and converting votes into mandates, with a variety of mixed electoral systems that seek to mitigate potential excessive effects of fragmentation or overrepresentation of the winner also existing in many countries. In this respect, southern Europe is very heterogeneous. In Portugal and Spain, a proportional electoral system has been in force since the founding elections (1975 and 1977, respectively). In France, the electoral system has been subordinated to the majority principle, with the exception of the 1986 election. In Greece and Italy, changes to the electoral system have been fairly frequent, both under the principle of proportionality and in the form of concessions to the majoritarian principle. Thus Greece and Italy were cases in which there was always wide conflict over the design of a basic rule of democracy itself (Alexander 2001). The imposition, in the absence of broad consensus, of recurrent changes to a core institution of the political system raises reservations about the full extent of democratic consolidation in these two countries, insofar as institutional predictability and general acceptance of the rules of the game are key traits of democratic regimes (Przeworski 1991, 34–40). The Portuguese electoral system has remained essentially unchanged since its inception in 1974 (Braga da Cruz 1998). According to Manuel Braga da Cruz (1998, 9), the reasons given for choosing a proportional system were related not only to the need to overcome the authoritarian experience, whose pseudoelections featured a closed majoritarian principle, but also to a conception of the electoral system as an instrument for knowing “the real democratic political sketch of the country.” Thus it was established that voters would vote on closed lists and that the conversion of votes into mandates would be done at the subnational district level. There were, therefore, twenty electoral districts corresponding to the national territory, and two others for Portuguese citizens living abroad. National electoral districts were, by constitutional impera­ tive, plurinominal, and there was no fixed threshold for the election of members of parliament, either at the district level or at the national aggregate level. District magnitude has always been highly variable. In the 1975 election for the Constituent Assembly, it ranged from four to fifty-­five, while the reduction in the number of MPs and national demographic trends led, in 2014, to a range between two and forty-­seven. This variance made the Portuguese system a case study for those interested in the effects of electoral magnitude (Lachat, Blais, and Lago 2015; Lago and Lobo 2014). On the other hand, in a concession to the majoritarian

Elections 61

principle, the chosen electoral formula (D’Hondt method) was one of the least proportional in the translation of votes into seats, as a device with the aim to foster governability (Braga da Cruz 1998, 9). In contrast to the Italian and Greek trajectories, the Portuguese electoral framework has been remarkably stable. However, several reform proposals have been advanced (Freire, Martins, and Moreira 2008; Costa Lobo, Santana Pereira, and Gaspar 2015). While one tends to argue above all for decreasing the magnitude of districts (Braga da Cruz 1998), another has suggested increasing the degree of freedom available to voters in the choice of candidates, pointing out that Portugal has one of most rigid systems in Europe (Pereira and Andrade e Silva 2009). Both Portugal and Spain established proportional representation in multimember districts and vote in closed lists. However, two dif­ ferences are worth emphasizing. First, in Spain there was a mandatory threshold of 3 percent at  the electoral district  level  before  votes were taken into account in the distribution of mandates. Second, the Span­ ish case also yielded more disproportional outcomes as a consequence of the prevalence of low-­magnitude districts. This difference is captured by V-­Dem data, which distinguishes between proportional systems with an average value of high magnitude (such as Portugal), and those with a low-­ magnitude value (such as Spain).3 Jonathan Hopkin (2005, 378) argued that the Spanish system since its inception was intended to appease the fears of elites aligned with the authoritarian regime at the time of transition, leading to the explicit favoring of rural areas to the detriment of urban ones. This argument points to the importance of the mode of transition in the institutional configuration of the two Iberian democracies, in line with Bermeo’s (1987), Robert Fishman’s (2011, 2019) and Tiago Fernandes’s (2015) arguments. Curiously, the evolution of the Spanish case up to the December 2015 election was a prime example of a system that, although derived from the proportional principle, has produced strongly majoritarian results (Hopkin 2005). Regarding the French case, the electoral system was subordi­nated to the majority principle. The two-­round majority electoral system was reintroduced in 1958, with the advent of the Fifth Republic, by de ­Gaulle’s personal determination (Elgie 2005), and it has been in place in all the legislative elections since then (except in 1986). The second round was waived if one of the candidates obtained more than half of the votes on the first, provided they corresponded to more than a quarter

62  João Cancela

of voters registered in the electoral district. Otherwise, the candidates with at least 12.5 percent of the votes would pass to the second round, which was then won by the candidate who obtained a simple majority. In France—as in Portugal and Spain—voting was not compulsory. In Greece and Italy, changes to the electoral system have been much more frequent and have oscillated between proportional and majority trends. The original Greek system implemented in 1974 was one of “reinforced proportionality,” consisting in an intricate overlapping of three levels, and corresponding to fifty-­six uni-­ and plurinominal districts. As Lijphart (1990, 74) observed, the qualification “reinforced” actually applied to the share of mandates obtained by the major parties, not to the proportionality of the system. Thus, as early as 1974, leftist parties criticized the system’s design for overly benefiting the winner (Linz and Stepan 1996, 134). This points to a commonality between the Greek and Spanish experiences, since in both countries’ transitions to democracy, the electoral systems favored the parties of the elites from previous authoritarian re­ gimes. Since the publication of seminal works on democratic transitions (Rustow 1970; O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986), several authors have emphasized the importance of the processes by which the institutions that govern democratic competition, such as the electoral system, are defined. From the start, in the Greek system there was a fitful history of reforms, which eventually reached an annual cadence (Lamprinakou 2012). One of the most striking changes occurred in 1985, with the replacement of preferential vote by closed-­list voting. The system in place in 2014 maintained some majoritarian features, since it presupposed the allocation of a bonus of fifty MPs to the most-­voted party at the national level. Note that the exercise of voting rights was still formally mandatory, although in 2001 the last sanctions associated with noncompliance were removed. At an earlier stage, failure to comply with this obligation could lead to administrative difficulties, for instance, in obtaining documents such as passports or driving licenses (Birch 2009, 9). Finally, the Italian case was also characterized by profound c­ hanges in the electoral system, especially since the 1990s (Lupo 2018). Although less frequent than in Greece, the changes were perhaps more profound, with three major reforms in 1993, 2005, and 2014. Until the 1993 reform, the system was based on two levels of apportioning, the first

Elections 63

with thirty-­two constituencies, and the second with a single national district that aggregated the wasted votes in the previous stage and converted them into mandates through the Hare method. Access to this second district required obtaining a mandate in at least one district and three hundred thousand votes at national level. Finally, voters had three or four preferential votes, depending on the magnitude of their district, which they could distribute among the candidates of a given party. The reform enacted between 1990 and 1993, led by members of the political elite who presented themselves as reformers and agents of system regeneration (Donovan 1995), was approved through a referendum and interpreted as a consequence of the deep dissatisfaction of citizens vis-­à-­vis the political system (D’Alimonte 2005, 255). Indeed, the electoral system in place until 1993 was often associated with political fragmentation, clientelism, and even the outright influence of criminal organizations on Italian politics. The fundamental point, however, was the dominant role of Christian Democracy (DC) and the resulting lack of alternation in the executive (Donovan 1995, 53). The system that was adopted afterwards distributed three-­quarters of the mandates by single-­member districts and the remaining 25 percent in twenty-­six districts with magnitudes ranging from one to eleven mandates. The voters thus had two ballots, one for choosing candidates and another for picking between lists. The two levels were not independent, since votes that had already been converted into mandates were subtracted from the votes tallied at the national level, so as not to favor large parties. The persistence of a complex system of alliances and transfers of votes and the explicit boycott of systemic mechanisms by the main political blocs (D’Alimonte 2005, 258) led to a new reform in 2005. This consisted in the introduction of a proportional system, with voting in closed lists, complemented by the award of a bonus to the winning list so that it automatically reached 340 mandates. Nonwinning parties or coalitions divided the remaining 244 mandates through the Hare method. The 2014 reform, which would not take effect until the 2016 elections, introduced a second round among the most-­voted lists to determine who won this mandate bonus (D’Alimonte 2015). As in Greece, voting was compulsory until 1993. In the current version, the term civic duty was retained, but the existence of a legal obligation, even if formal, was removed (Gratschew 2004, 28).

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On the basis of the above overview, we can group the countries in two categories: Portugal and Spain, on the one side, showing a n ­ otable institutional constancy; and Greece and Italy, with frequent and very deep changes. As for France, the amendment promoted in 1985 and its immediate reversion in the following year separate it from the first group, although the volume of changes was not comparable to the Greek and Italian cases. Despite the stability of the Portuguese and Spanish systems throughout, the broader historical analysis by Colomer (2004, 55–56) showed that, since the nineteenth century, the countries of southern Europe have most frequently changed their electoral systems. The French episode of 1985–86 and, above all, the successive changes in Greece and Italy, all approved in a short period, suggest that the frequent change of electoral laws was part of a situation of permanent political crises. However, the results achieved in both cases suggest that the effec­ tiveness of these institutional reforms in deepening the quality of de­ mocracy was quite limited, as these reforms were very short-­lived. As Alan Renwick (2011) showed, this was an area where legislative changes came from different impulses and followed a variety of procedural channels. While the Italian reform of 1993 was clearly influenced by popular demand, the remaining changes corresponded to impositions by the majority in government or, in a smaller number of cases, to agreements between a broad spectrum of parties. Thus, although the Italian and Greek cases revealed a greater institutional plasticity that led to greater ease in adopting electoral reforms (Núñez and Jacobs 2016), they were seldom based on broad party agreements, which meant they did not last. A relevant criterion to assess the impact of electoral systems on the quality of democracy concerns the personal accountability of representatives to voters in their district (Gallagher 1991, 2005, 571). Typically, this was a criterion that was fostered by systems in which all (France) or a part (Italy in the period 1993–2005) of representatives were elected through uninominal districts. Open-­list proportional representation systems, such as the Greek, in which voters had the ability to formulate one or more preferences in relation to the party candidates they chose, also favored this criterion. On the other hand, in proportional representation systems with closed lists, as in Portugal and Spain, voters’ capacity to hold an individual candidate responsible was practically nil (table 1.1).

Elections 65 TABLE 1.1.  Formal institutions in the five countries

Electoral system

Compulsory vote

Minimum voting age

Country

Elections

France

11

Two-round majoritarian, except No for the 1986 elections, which had proportional representation.

Italy

13

Until 1993: combined system: 32 districts + 1 national; 3 or 4 preferential votes, according to magnitude; threshold of 300,000 national votes. 1993–2005: 75% of mandates through uninominal districts; 25% redistributed through PR (Hare). 2006–15: proportional with closed lists and overlapping minimum thresholds. Automatic attribution of mandates to the winner, up to 340 representatives. 2016: second round determining the winner of the electoral bonus.

Yes, until 1993 (residual penalties)

21 until 1973; 18 from 1976 on

Greece

15

Until 2007: combined system, with multiple changes (1974, 1977, 1985, 1989, 1990, 2004). Since 2007: 260 mandates proportionally attributed and 50 bonus for the party with the highest vote. National threshold of 3%. Preferential cross-voting.

Yes, although with no penalties since 2001

21 in 1974; 20 in 1977 and 1981; 18 from 1985 on

Portugal

14

Proportional with closed lists. High variance in district magnitude.

No

18 throughout

Spain

11

Proportional with closed lists. Some variance in district magnitude.

No

21 in 1977; 18 since

21 until 1973; 18 from 1978 on

Sources: For France, Elgie (2005); for Italy, D’Alimonte (2005, 2015); for Greece, Lamprinakou (2012); for Portugal, Braga da Cruz (1998); for Spain, Hopkin (2005).

66  João Cancela TABLE 1.2.  Disproportionality between votes and mandates

Portugal Spain Greece France Italy

Average of Least Squares Index

Standard deviation

Most disproportional elections

 4.80  7.22  8.36 15.28  5.43

1.01 2.03 3.37 5.60 4.19

1987 (6.1) 1977 (10), 1979 (10.6) 1974 (15.8), May 2012 (12.9) 1993 (25.3), 2002 (22), 2012 (17) 2001 (10.2), 2013 (17.3)

Note: The table reproduces the values of the Least Squares Index (Gallagher 1991). The lower the value of the index, the greater the correspondence between the proportion of votes and mandates obtained. Source: Gallagher (2015).

The degree of correspondence between voters’ preferences and representative bodies is another criterion for assessing electoral systems (Gallagher 2005, 571). In fact, if we posit that the quality of democracy varies according to the political incorporation of new actors, it is important to understand the extent to which electoral systems create entry barriers to new parties into the parliamentary arena (Lijphart 1991, 77; Dinas, Riera, and Roussias 2015). An analysis of data compiled by Michael Gallagher (2015) on the degree of proportionality between votes and their conversion into mandates in the legislative assemblies of the five countries (Gallagher and Mitchell 2005, 602) showed that there were important variations in this respect, presented in table 1.2. This analysis is necessarily circumscribed and, because of omitted variable effects, does not allow us to categorically establish causal relations between the types of electoral system and the “openness” of political regimes. Furthermore, there was a bias from the outset, as institutional frameworks affected not only parties’ entry into the competition arena but the very behavior of voters, who may have dispensed with voting for their first choice when faced with the existing structure of incentives, thus hindering the interpretation of the data (Cox 1997; Gallego, Rico, and Anduiza 2012).4 Despite these limitations, the data suggests that Portugal was the system in which the apportioning of mandates has been most faithful to the distribution of votes. This was reflected in the incorporation

Elections 67

and electoral growth of the radical left formation Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) since 1999. Throughout most of the period, Greece showed similarities with Portugal. However, in the May 2012 election, about one-­fifth of the votes were dispersed by parties that failed to meet the 3 percent threshold and were consequently “wasted” (Vasilopoulou and Halikiopoulou 2013). Still, SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left— Progressive Alliance) was ultimately able to overcome the barriers of the electoral system and become the second most-­voted party in the two elections held in 2012, after which it went on to achieve as well a plurality of the votes in the January and September 2015 elections. In Spain, the majoritarian effects of the system and the variance in district magnitude coincided with the proliferation of regional parties. Thus, at least until the 2011 elections, the system produced an “imperfect two-­party system” (Hopkin 2005, 382), counterbalanced by the success of regionalist parties in the Basque Country and Catalonia. Nonetheless, before 2015, the system proved to be relatively impervious to the emergence of political forces capable of disputing the national dominance of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and the Popular Alliance / Popular Party (AP/PP). This picture would change dramatically in the elections of 2015 and 2016, in which Podemos (radical left) and Ciudadanos (liberal), two challenger parties, achieved strong electoral results throughout the territory. Italy is particularly interesting in that the reforms implemented in the early 1990s spawned a pattern of competition between two ideological blocs with high levels of internal fragmentation. In the 2013 election, this unstable balance was called into question by the emergence of the Five Star Movement, which managed to overcome the electoral system’s barriers, securing a quarter of the votes and 109 seats in the Chamber of Deputies (Bordignon and Ceccarini 2013). Finally, in France the barriers to the entry of new parties, as measured by levels of disproportionality, have proven to be almost insurmountable. This exclusion affected notably—at least until the 2012 legislative elections—the National Front, a radical right-­wing party that managed to conquer only a residual number of mandates, despite the proportions of votes obtained in the first round of the most recent elections (Spanje and Brug 2007).

68  João Cancela

Informal Institutions

The institutional variations analyzed above are related to the legal regulation of the exercise of the vote and its conversion into mandates. However, arguably these are not the only institutional constraints on the decision to participate and voting choices. Following the work by ­Guillermo O’Donnell (1994), a line of research has extended the concept of “political institutions” to informal and uncoded practices. Helmke and Levitsky (2006, 5) define informal institutions as “socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned channels.” While the five cases were examples of consolidated democracies, the V-­Dem database allows us to explore the extent to which elections in southern Europe may have been imbued with such practices. Among the available indicators, the one that offers the most interesting results is the variable v2elvotbuy (Pemstein et al. 2015; Coppedge et al. 2016, 86), which measures whether in a certain national election there was “evidence of vote and/or turnout buying.” The analysis of the evolution of this variable (figure 1.2; the scale is reproduced in the note) revealed the persistence, albeit residual, of practices of soliciting votes with monetary and other material inducements. Farthest from the maximum score (4—absence of vote buying) were Italy and, to a lesser extent, Greece. It should be noted that the magnitude of these practices was not high in any of the cases. Value 3, the one that most closely approximates the Greek and Italian position during this period, limits the incidence of these practices to narrowly circumscribed portions of territory. It is possible to tentatively draw an association between the dissemination of these practices and the kind of public policies formulated and enacted by the governments following from the electoral results. Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson (2007) showed that the adoption of particularistic, as opposed to programmatic and impersonal, electoral strategies is not restricted to incipient democracies or to countries with frail economies. Some countries in southern Europe reinforce this observation. Figure 1.3 reproduces the evolution of the variable v2dlencmp (Pemstein et al. 2015; Coppedge et al. 2016, 195), which measures the extent to which social and infrastructural expenditure has a

Elections 69

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FIGURE 1.2.  Vote buying in southern Europe. Question (v2elvotbuy): “In this national election, was there evidence of vote and/or turnout buying?” Options: 0: Yes. There was systematic, widespread, and almost nationwide vote/turnout buying by almost all parties and candidates. 1: Yes, some. There were nonsystematic but rather common vote-­buying efforts, even if only in some parts of the country or by one or a few parties. 2: Restricted. Parties or candidates distributed money and/or personal gifts, but these offerings were more about meeting an “entry-­ticket” expectation and less about actual vote choice or turnout, even if a smaller number of individuals might also be persuaded. 3: Almost none. There was limited use of money and personal gifts, or these attempts were limited to a few small areas of the country. In all, they probably affected less than a few percent of voters. 4: None. There was no evidence of vote/turnout buying. Sources: Pemstein et al. (2015); Coppedge et al. (2016, 86–87).

more particularistic (0) or programmatic (4) bent. Greece ranked lowest throughout the period, followed by Italy. Portugal occupied an intermediate position, slightly below France and Spain. Thus there was a coincidence between the purchase of votes observable in Italy and Greece and the nature of public policies in these countries. The literature suggests several explanations for these two cases. As regards Italy, one justification concerns the specificity of the party system, and in particular the idiosyncrasy of the DC, a highly fragmented party in which each faction depended on the support of distinct and well-­defined geographical areas, with internal dynamics reflecting a

70  João Cancela

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FIGURE 1.3.  Expenditure in particularistic or public goods. Question (v2dlencmp): “Considering the profile of social and infrastructural spending in the national budget, how ‘particularistic’ or ‘public goods’ are most expenditures?” Options: 0: Almost all of the social and infrastructure expenditures are particularistic. 1: Most social and infrastructure expenditures are particularistic, but a significant portion (e.g., one-­fourth or one-­third) is public goods. 2: Social and infrastructure expenditures are evenly divided between particularistic and public goods programs. 3: Most social and infrastructure expenditures are public goods, but a significant portion (e.g., one-­fourth or one-­third) is particularistic. 4: Almost all social and infrastructure expenditures are public goods in character. Only a small portion is particularistic. Sources: Pemstein et al. (2015); Coppedge et al. (2016, 195–96).

balance between the interests and resources of various personal and local groups (Hopkin and Mastropaolo 2001, 157). These characteristics of the DC were enhanced by the political culture of southern Italy, characterized as a breeding ground of vertical connections between voters and their representatives. Judith Chubb (1982) showed that clientelistic interactions in Naples and Palermo in the 1970s not only were based on dependencies between the lower classes and the elites but also extended to the middle classes. In these regions, DC’s administrative discretion and latitude of action would push voters to vote for this party, and preferential voting encouraged the persistence of individualized relationships (Chubb 1982, 6). Robert Putnam (1993, 94) also pointed out that the use of preferential voting was much more widespread in the southern uncivic Italian regions. In practice, this meant that, until the early 1990s, the central organs of the party played a minor role in the selection of candidates,

Elections 71

which, especially in the South, was often influenced by Mafia-­like organizations. This decentralization of the candidate selection process, combined with the “freedom of choice” afforded to voters, gave incentives to faction leaders—or those who controlled them from the outside—to secure the election of “their” candidates, namely through the exchange of particularistic goods. The electoral reform of the early 1990s was partly intended to challenge this practice. The period following the abolition of the preferential vote in 1993 coincided with a slight improvement in the score attributed to this indicator, which nonetheless remained comparatively negative in relation to the other countries. Concerning the Greek case, more than subnational idiosyncrasies, the literature pointed out the persistence of a link between voters and parties of a particularist type. Lyrintzis (1984) suggested that during the early years of Greek democracy the main Greek parties—with the exception of the Communist Party (KKE)—were highly dependent on their leaders, having cemented their bases of support through a model of bureaucratic clientelism. Later work reinforced this diagnosis, showing that the dilution of the state-­party boundary resulted in the lack of impartiality on the part of the public administration and in the incorporation of the lower classes into politics through asymmetrical and vertical connections (Papakostas 2001, 40). In this context, and even with a residual expression, the offer of material incentives in exchange for votes for a particular party represented a manifestation of a system in which the official rules were complemented by a set of practices that, although not codified, effectively constrained the options available to part of the population. A point of commonality between Italy and Greece is that their party systems were, after the transitions to democracy in the aftermath of World War II, clearly dominated by conservative parties. The experience of these two countries differed from that of Spain, where democratization happened later and where there was a change in government after the third free general election (1982). In Greece, the right-­wing hegemony in the postwar period was particularly strong, with wide persecution of left-­wing militants, during both democratic and dictatorial periods. This policy had effective consequences at least until the 1970s, when descendants of members of the Greek Communist Party were still barred from joining the public sector ( Judt 2005, 49). In Italy, the DC’s

72  João Cancela

dominance at the national level was counterbalanced by the election of leftist political forces to many local and regional bodies. Even so, control of resources at the national level allowed the DC to “colonize” at “every level from village to national capital a protean range of public services and state-­controlled or state-­subsidized products,” thus benefiting “millions of children and grandchildren of landless peasants who found secure employment in the bureaucracies that resulted” ( Judt 2005, 361–62). The two Iberian democracies were able to break away from this pattern. It should be noted that political culture in both countries was also marked by a long tradition of clientelism, which predated twentieth-­ century authoritarian regimes (Tavares de Almeida 1991; Pérez Díaz 1993; Bermeo 2010; Robles Egea 1996). So what prevented the survival and adaptation of clientelism after the democratic transitions in the 1970s? In a comparison between the Italian and Spanish cases, Hopkin and Alfio Mastropaolo (2001) argued that the economic level at the date of the establishment of democracy was a decisive factor. Specifically, economic deprivation in postwar Italy, especially in the South, was much higher than in 1970s Spain (Hopkin and Mastropaolo 2001, 162; Hopkin 2001). Note, in this regard, that in Andalusia and Extremadura, two of the Spanish regions with more of a tradition of inequality of land ownership, there were also recurrent episodes of electoral mobilization using private incentives, promoted mainly by the PSOE (Pérez Díaz 1993, 68; Hopkin and Mastropaolo 2001, 166). As for Portugal, the literature highlighted the impact of the revolutionary transition of 1974–75 (Bermeo 2010, 1141; Fishman 2011, 2019; Fernandes 2015, 1084). A striking contrast can be drawn between what happened in the Portuguese southern region of Alentejo, on the one hand, and, on the other, in the South of Italy and, to a lesser extent, in Extremadura and Andalusia. Although Alentejo’s society shared some structural features with the southern latifundia regions of Italy and Spain (Cutileiro 1977), the processes of emancipation and collective action stemming from the democratic transition itself helped prevent the institutionalization of a type of politics based on asymmetric ties (Fernandes 2015, 1086). According to this reading, the specific features of Alentejo’s political development were symptomatic of more general

Elections 73

features of the type of party competition resulting from the Portuguese transition to democracy. Thus the revolution gave rise to a system in which competition between parties was based on ideological and programmatic strategies, as opposed to other possible paths relying on vertical mobilization. By establishing their calls to vote on programmatic incentives, parties established ties with civil society organizations, thus contributing to strengthening the quality of democracy in its crucial inaugural stage (Fernandes 2015, 1086). France shows some fluctuations regarding the purchase of votes, especially between the 1980s and the dawn of the new century. This trend was related to administrative decentralization, which led to a relative loss of control on the part of national political party leaders and the emergence of local autonomy centers (Nakayama 2009). In the case of the French Socialist Party, for example, practices of electoral mobilization varied considerably between regions (Nakayama 2009, 107). This circumstance facilitated the incipient development of voting mobilization networks based on nonprogrammatic principles. However, the literature on France indicates that the prevalence of voting practices based on clientelistic exchanges was confined to the dispute for local power and did not extend significantly to national politics. Similarly, and according to Frédéric Sawicki (1998), the resort to particularistic policies was contained by the institutional and recruitment culture of the French public administration, characterized by a high degree of autonomy. The two countries where there was frequent and radical change in the electoral system (Greece and Italy) were also those where vote-­buying practices persisted more enduringly. The extensive roll of institutional reforms in Italy did not necessarily lead to an effective overcoming of practices deemed harmful to democracy. Not surprisingly, also electoral oversight bodies were more capable and autonomous in France, Portugal, and Spain than in Greece and Italy. The evolution of the autonomy of the electoral administration (Pemstein et al. 2015; Coppedge et al. 2016, 78), reproduced in figure 1.4, shows that despite the existence of autonomous electoral administrations in Italy and Greece, these countries had yet to reach the maximum score by the end of the period under analysis.

74  João Cancela ϮϬй

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FIGURE 1.4.  Autonomy of electoral administration. Question (v2elembaut): “Does the Election Management Body (EMB) have autonomy from government to apply election laws and administrative rules impartially in national elections?” Options: 0: No. The incumbent government, the military, or other de facto ruling body controls the EMB. 1: Somewhat. The EMB has some autonomy on some issues, but on critical issues that influence the outcome of elections, the EMB is partial to the de facto ruling body. 2: Ambiguous. The EMB has some autonomy but is also partial, and it is unclear to what extent this influences the outcome of the election. 3: Almost. The EMB has autonomy and acts impartially almost all the time. It may be influenced by the de facto ruling body in some minor ways that do not influence the outcome of elections. 4: Yes. The EMB is autonomous and impartially applies elections laws and administrative rules. Sources: Pemstein et al. (2015); Coppedge et al. (2016, 78–79).

Electoral Participation

High levels of electoral participation are often seen as an indicator of democratic quality (Altman and Perez-­Liñán 2002; Economist Intelligence Unit 2013; Franklin 2003), as well as the persistence of asymmetries leading to the systematic underrepresentation of certain groups (Lijphart 1997). Work on electoral participation at the aggregate level has sought to identify the correlates of both intercountry and temporal variations in electoral participation ( Jackman and Miller 1995; Franklin 2004; Gray and Caul 2000) by analyzing the impact of economic variables or the generational composition of the electorate. Given the panel structure of our data—five temporal series—both aspects are pertinent. It is as important to distinguish the causes of each country’s evolution

Elections 75

of participation as to understand the factors that explain differences between countries. In researching electoral participation at the aggregate level there is often a dilemma concerning the most appropriate measurement of this variable. Specifically, should voter turnout be measured as the proportion of voters vis-­à-­vis the census population or, rather, the voting-­ age population (Stockemer 2017)? The answer is not inconsequential, especially given the importance of population movements over recent decades and the concomitant increase in the proportion of immigrants in economically more developed democracies. Although this stratum of the population does not hold voting rights in national elections, it is accounted as resident population of voting age. Thus their inclusion in the denominator from which the participation rate is calculated may lead to an overestimation of abstention. On the other hand, the correspondence between electoral participation and the proportion of the enrolled population that exercises voting rights may suffer from a symmetrical bias (the inclusion of individuals who do not reside in the country of origin), in addition to not considering those who are not registered to vote (Stockemer 2017). Both options therefore entail risks of bias, and there is no optimal solution. The criterion adopted here is to take as denominator the resident population of voting age to minimize the effect of outdated electoral registries. However, it should be stressed that the two measures have a strong positive correlation. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient between the electoral participation series measured using as denominator the voting-­ age population and that using the census population is very high in the cases of France, Italy, and Portugal (in the order of 0.95), quite high in the case of Greece (0.85), and slightly less so in the Spanish case (0.77). Thus, with the partial exception of the latter case, the image resulting from the observation of the evolution of the electoral participation rate does not change significantly according to which measure is used. Figure 1.5 shows the evolution of electoral participation in the five countries between 1968 and 2012, using as a denominator the legal voting-­age population (v2elvaptrn variable, Coppedge et al. 2016, 97). The overall picture is one of diminishing participation levels, although with some nuances. In France, the decline was less steep, although the starting point was the lowest among the five countries. The sharpest

76  João Cancela

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FIGURE 1.5.  Evolution of electoral participation. Here, electoral participation is voter turnout as a proportion of adult population in country. Source: Coppedge et al. (2016, 78–79).

decline was observed in Portugal, followed by Greece and Spain, where the proportion of voters also decreased consistently from the turn of the century. Before looking for explanations for the variations in electoral participation, it is important to understand to what extent this trajectory was an outlier or whether it was in line with a broader context. The evidence clearly points to the second hypothesis, as there has been a consistent increase in abstention in several regions of the globe, especially in Europe and North America in the last decades of the twentieth century and in the first decades of the twenty-­first century (Franklin 2004; Blais, Gidengil, and Nevitte 2004; Hooghe and Kern 2017).5 Moreover, in southern Europe, the decline in electoral participation has gone in tandem with a negative evolution in public opinion indicators such as trust in institutions and democratic satisfaction (Magalhães 2004; Torcal 2014). What are the roots of this decline in electoral participation? Robert Jackman and Ross Miller (1995) criticized the argument that higher values of electoral participation were the product of political socialization in democracy, pointing out as a counterexample precisely the founding elections of Portugal, Greece, and Spain. On the other hand, the difference in starting points between Portugal and Spain may be, according to Bermeo (1987, 213), due to the type of democratic transition of

Elections 77

the first, through widespread popular collective action, in comparison to the second, guided from above by elites. In fact, the notion that electoral participation is inherently higher in “founding” elections is disproved by empirical evidence (Turner 1993). In line with Bermeo, Jackman and Miller (1995, 480) argued that the degree of participation owes more to current institutions than to the legacy of the authoritarian past. The scarcity of observation points (elections) in each country does not allow for a rigorous testing of the reasons for the decrease in participation in this set of cases. Notwithstanding, a limited scope analysis may be useful to confirm how institutional variables are associated with high levels of participation. Given that the data have a panel structure— several elections held in each country—there are two possible methodological approaches: regression with fixed effects and regression with random effects. Although the use of fixed effects models is predominant in the literature, the low number of groups and observations per country makes the second option preferable (Clark and Linzer 2015). Considering the scarcity of data, the potential for finding inferences beyond the scope of these five cases is necessarily low, and the coefficients should therefore be interpreted with caution. The purpose of the analysis is to assess the robustness of voting requirements, different electoral systems, and the passage of time as predictors of electoral participation levels. Regarding the effects of institutional variables, a review of the literature (Cancela and Geys 2016) showed that compulsory voting had a success rate of 86 percent (out of a total of forty-­three studies reviewed), while the hypothesis that more proportional electoral systems induced higher levels of participation was corroborated in 53 percent of the studies (n = 51). In order to increase the number of observations available, we have extended the time series to cover pre-­1968 elections in France and Italy. The results are reproduced in the first column of table 1.3 and conform to the expectations of the literature. The existence of compulsory voting is associated with a significant increase in participation, of around 10 percentage points. Nonmajoritarian systems are associated with greater participation—although the fact that two-­round majority representation was present only in the case of France advises caution in interpreting this result. Also, the passage of time is an efficient predictor of declining participation levels, with abstention rising consistently. The

78  João Cancela TABLE 1.3.  Random effects regression model (dependent variable: electoral participation)

Dependent variable: Electoral participation (1) 10.41*** (1.73) 12.35*** (2.17) 10.63*** (2.92) –0.16*** (0.04)

(2)

Compulsory vote Proportional representation Combined system Time (years) Union density Margin of victory Polarization Constant

381.85*** (85.16)

4.37** (2.03) 8.27*** (2.85) 10.40*** (3.41) –0.27*** (0.07) 0.31*** (0.08) –0.10 (0.11) –1.58* (0.94) 603.06*** (140.96)

Observations R2 Adjusted R2 F statistic

74 0.64 0.60 30.55*** (df = 4; 69)

57 0.71 0.62 19.90*** (df = 6; 50)

Note: *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p 0.5). This suggests that, from the standpoint of the legislator, these two mechanisms can be seen as redundant. Switzerland and, to a lesser extent, Italy are representative of this inverse relationship. In these European champions of bottom-­up direct democracy (almost) no plebiscites are held. On the other hand, four of the five European countries with the highest incidence of plebiscites (the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, France, and Romania) do not allow direct democracy instruments initiated by citizens. L E S SONS L E ARNED

The analysis of the V-­Dem data on direct democracy in southern Europe shows that there is a remarkable difference between Italy and the other countries of the region. The potential for direct democracy is much higher in Italy than in Portugal, France, Greece, and Spain. Portugal and Greece do not envisage constitutional referenda, popular initiatives, and abrogative referenda. As for plebiscites, their occurrence is rare. Between 1974 and 2016, there were only three plebiscites in Portugal and two in Greece. In addition, in Portugal it is necessary to reach the threshold of 50 percent of registered voters for a binding result, even if, in the past, results that were not legally binding became politically so, with the parliament acquiescing with the results of the popular vote. In Spain and France, both plebiscites and constitutional referenda are allowed, but in Spain the former are very rare and merely consultative. The Italian case is singular. It is the only democracy in southern Europe where plebiscites are not constitutionally envisaged, although one was held in 1989 after a special law was passed. It is also the only case where referenda initiated by citizens to repeal a law are allowed, and their use has been intense since the mid-­1970s. The reasons for the Italian specificity seem to be related to the strategic use of an instrument of direct democracy by a micro party that, in a context of high party system fragmentation, had the purpose of stirring up the political waters and extracting political and policy gains. In short, the intraregional variation does show a division between old and new democracies but a specificity of Italy that contrasts with a relatively more homogeneous pattern elsewhere. The Italian case is rare

158  José Santana Pereira and Tiago Tibúrcio

not only in the context of southern Europe but also in a wider context. The remaining countries in this region are closer to the general European patterns. We may also note that the factors underlying the institution of instruments of direct democracy are often connected to the conquest or preservation of political-­partisan influence at a given moment. In the Portuguese case, this seems to explain the rejection of the constitutional referendum, advocated by right-­wing political forces in the early years of Portuguese democracy as an instrument aimed to correct the course of the revolution and specific guarantees established in the constitution. In Italy, although the abrogative referendum had been established since the inception of the 1948 Constitution, over twenty years would pass before it was enacted in law, as a direct result of partisan disputes around the divorce law. As far as both France and Italy are concerned, there is a debate about the extent to which the frequency of direct democracy events is not in fact primarily due to the personal agenda of the French president or, as in Italy, to the strategy of the Radical Party (Morel 2007; Luciani 2008). Similar considerations on the importance of strategic political-­ partisan considerations can be made regarding the use of the plebiscite in Portugal in 1998 (Filipe 2013) or Spain in the 1980s (Morel 2007). In addition, considering the abrogative nature of the Italian referenda and the low popular participation that characterized them (with the exception of 2011), it is difficult, at least for recent years, to defend the thesis that the frequent recourse to this type of referendum is a sign of the vitality and quality of Italian civil society. The differences in the political consequences of direct democracy instruments in these countries are also of note. If, in France, plebiscites’ results are often congruent with the executive’s position (except in 1969 and 2005), in other countries the trend is not as clear. The same congruence is seen in the results of plebiscites in Greece (2015) and in Italy (1989), but in Portugal the results are contrary to the executive’s position in two of the three cases (in Spain, it is in one of two). We find it difficult to draw firm conclusions, but it seems nonetheless clear that the difference between the French and the Iberian cases has to do with the differing objectives and reasons behind the plebiscites in question. It seems that when political protagonists are strongly committed to the

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victory of a given outcome, making their permanence in their offices dependent on winning a referendum, there is a risk that the plebiscite or referendum will be understood not as a way of expressing opinions about a political issue but as a way of rewarding or punishing incumbents. This has led to shocks and changes in power, forcing presidents and prime ministers to resign. This was the case in France in 1969 and in Italy in 2016. What of the political consequences of abrogative referenda? The analysis of the Italian case has shown that their impact has weakened, since the inability to reach participation quotas implies that in the last twenty years, only once (in 2011) were results binding—much to PM Silvio Berlusconi’s regret, since the revoked law was deemed by his opponents as ad personam. It is likely that, by discouraging turnout or declaring “freedom of vote,” the main Italian parties, rarely involved in initiating abrogative referenda, have been able to keep participation rates under 50 percent, thus nullifying their consequences. NOT E S 1.  The use of instruments of this nature by undemocratic regimes was relatively frequent in southern Europe. See, for example, the cases of Portugal in 1933, Spain in the 1960s and 1970s, Greece in 1968 and 1973, and Italy in 1929 and 1934 (Filipe 2013). 2.  Since 1997, a participation rate of at least a 50 percent of the electorate has been required for the results to be binding.

REF ERENCE S Aguiar-­Conraria, Luís, and Pedro C. Magalhães. 2010a. “How Quorum Rules Distort Referendum Outcomes: Evidence from a Pivotal Voter Mode.” European Journal of Political Economy 26 (4): 541–57. Aguiar-­Conraria, Luís, and Pedro C. Magalhães. 2010b. “Referendum Design, Quorum Rules and Turnout.” Public Choice 144 (1–2): 63–81. Aguiar-­Conraria, Luís, Pedro Magalhães, and Christoph A. Vanberg. 2016. “Experimental Evidence That Quorum Rules Discourage Turnout and Promote Election Boycotts.” Experimental Economics 19 (4): 886–909.

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Altman, David. 2011. Direct Democracy Worldwide. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. “Measuring the Potential of Direct Democracy around the World (1900–2014).” V-­Dem Working Paper No. 17. Amoretti, Ugo M. 2002. “Italy Decentralizes.” Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 126–40. Barber, Benjamin. 1984. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boix, Carles, and James Alt. 1991. “Partisan Voting in the Spanish 1986 NATO Referendum: An Ecological Analysis.” Electoral Studies 10 (1): 18–32. Bowler, Shaun. 2002. Review of The Battle over Citizen Lawmaking: A Collection of Essays, by M. Dane Waters. Journal of Politics 64 (1): 285–87. Budge, Ian. 2006. “Direct Democracy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, edited by R. A. W. Rhodes, Sarah A. Binder, and Bert A. Rockman, 595–610. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bull, Martin J. 2007. “The Constitutional Referendum of June 2006: End of the ‘Great Reform’ but Not of Reform Itself.” In Italian Politics: The Center-­Left Poisoned Victory, edited by Jean-­Louis Briquet and Alfio Mastropaolo, 99–118. New York: Bergham Books. Cain, Bruce E., Russell J. Dalton, and Susan E. Scarrow. 2003. Democracy Transformed? Expanding Political Opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Staffan I. Lindberg, Svend-­Erik Skaaning, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Frida Andersson, et al. 2016a. V-­Dem Codebook v6. University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy (V-­Dem) Project. www​.v​-dem​.net​/data​/dataset​-archive. Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Staffan I. Lindberg, Svend-­Erik Skaaning, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Frida Andersson, et al. 2016b. V-­Dem Dataset v6. University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy (V-­Dem) Project. www​.v​-dem​.net​/data​/dataset​-archive. Criddle, Byron. 1993. “The French Referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, September 1992.” Parliamentary Affairs 46 (2): 228–38. Cronin, Thomas E. 1989. Direct Democracy. The Politics of Initiative, Referendum and Recall. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Donovan, Mark. 1995. “The Referendum and the Transformation of the Party System.” Modern Italy 1 (1): 53–69. Fabbrini, Sergio. 2001. “Has Italy Rejected the Referendum Path to Change? The Failed Referenda of May 2000.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6 (1): 38–56.

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Fernandes, Tiago, João Cancela, Edalina Rodrigues Sanches, and José Santana Pereira. 2019. Instituições e qualidade da democracia: Cultura política na Europa do Sul. Lisbon: Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation. Filipe, António. 2013. The Referendum in the Portuguese Constitutional Experience. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Freire, André. 2008. Sociedade civil, democracia participativa e poder político: O caso do referendo do aborto, 2007. Lisbon: Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Freire, André, and Michael Baum. 2003. “Referenda Voting in Portugal, 1998: The Effects of Party Sympathies, Social Structure and Pressure Groups.” European Journal of Political Research 41 (1): 135–61. Gallagher, Tom. 1999. “Unconvinced by Europe of the Regions: The 1998 Regionalization Referendum in Portugal.” South European Society and Politics 4 (1): 132–48. Hainsworth, Paul. 2006. “France Says No: The 29 May 2005 Referendum on the European Constitution.” Parliamentary Affairs 59 (1): 98–117. Leininger, Arndt. 2015. “Popular Support for Direct Democracy in Europe.” Paper presented to the ECPR Joint Sessions, Warsaw. Luciani, Massimo. 2008. “El referéndum: Questiones teóricas y de la experiencia italiana.” Revista Catalana de Dret Public 37:1–15. Maniquet, François, and Massimo Morelli. 2010. “Approval Quorums Dominate Participation Quorums.” EUI Working Paper ECO 2010/13. https://​cadmus​.eui​.eu​/handle​/1814​/13664. Miranda, Jorge, and Rui Medeiros. 2006. Constituição Portuguesa anotada— Tomo II. Coimbra: Coimbra Editora. Morel, Laurence. 2007. “The Rise of ‘Politically Obligatory’ Referendums: The 2005 French Referendum in Comparative Perspective.” West European Politics 30 (5): 1041–67. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Qvortrup, Mads. 2014. Referendums around the World: The Continued Growth of Direct Democracy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Setälä, Maija, and Theo Schiller. 2012. Citizens’ Initiatives in Europe: Procedures and Consequences of Agenda-­Setting by Citizens. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Suksi, Markku. 1993. Bringing in the People: A Comparison of Constitutional Forms and Practices of the Referendums. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Svensson, Palle. 2011. “Forms and Terminology of Direct Democracy.” Paper presented at the IPSA and ECPR Joint Conference, São Paulo, February. Torreblanca, José Ignacio. 2005. “El referéndum sobre la Constitución Europea en España: Una doble decepción.” Real Boletín Elcano 62 (February 21).

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www​.realinstitutoelcano​.org​/analisis​/el​-referendum​-sobre​-la​-constitucion​ -europea​-en​-espana​-una​-doble​-decepcion/. Tridimas, George. 2010. “Referendum and the Choice between Monarchy and Republic in Greece.” Constitutional Political Economy 21 (2): 119–44. Tsebelis, George. 2002. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Uleri, Pier Vincenzo. 1996. Introduction to The Referendum Experience in Europe, edited by Michael Gallagher and Pier Vincenzo Uleri, 1–19. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 2002. “On Referendum Voting in Italy: Yes, No or Non-­vote? How Italian Parties Learned to Control Referendums.” European Journal of Political Research 41 (6): 863–83. ———. 2012. “Institutions of Citizens’ Political Participation in Italy: Crooked Forms, Hindered Institutionalization.” In Citizens’ Initiatives in Europe: Procedures and Consequences of Agenda-­Setting by Citizens, edited by Maija Setälä and Theo Schiller, 71–88. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vallès, Josep M., Francesc Pallarés, and Ramon Maria Canals. 1986. “The Referendum of 12 March 1986 on Spain’s Remaining in NATO.” Electoral Studies 5 (3): 305–11.

FOUR

Media and Politics José Santana Pereira and Pedro Diniz de Sousa

The media play a decisive role in democracy’s functioning. In contemporary Europe, the quality of the democratic process is strongly shaped by the media, since this is the main channel by which political information reaches citizens, as well as the primordial arena of collective debate and expression of a plurality of points of view. However, the various types of media that operate in a particular context, and the relations between them—what are usually called media systems—differ strongly in the degree to which they perform these functions (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Santana Pereira 2012, 2016; Brüggeman et al. 2014). Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini’s (2004) classic study considered the media systems of southern Europe as being part of a single model, which, following Giovanni Sartori’s (1976) party system typology, they classified as polarized pluralism. Its main traits were poorly developed press markets, insufficient professionalization of the journalistic class, high levels of parallelism with the party system, and strong state intervention (see also Hallin and Papathanassopoulos 2002; Voltmer 2008). 163

164  José Santana Pereira and Pedro Diniz de Sousa

Given the intimate relationship between political and media systems, we may ask to what extent, and how quickly, the democratization processes in Portugal, Spain, and Greece of the mid-­1970s led to a convergence of their media systems, bringing them closer to those of the more established and older southern democracies, such as France or Italy. In other words, is there homogeneity within southern Europe, or does a comparative and longitudinal empirical analysis reveal diverging trajectories and patterns? If there is homogeneity, did it come about right after the democratic transitions of Portugal, Spain, and Greece, or did it happen more gradually? To answer these questions, we carry out a comparative and longitudinal analysis of the relationship between media and politics in five southern European countries. Varieties of Democracy (V-­Dem) data are examined along three conceptual axes—political pluralism, journalists’ ethics, and freedom of the press. These three dimensions allow us to draw a full picture of the evolution of southern Europe’s media systems over the last five decades, as they are by far the most politically relevant dimensions of media systems. The five countries under analysis are also those that Hallin and Mancini (2004) placed in the category of polarized pluralist media systems. The empirical analysis starts in 1968, a few years before the democratic transitions of Portugal, Greece, and Spain, and ends in 2012 (France and Greece) or 2014 (Portugal, Spain, and Italy). This chapter first analyzes the literature on media systems in southern Europe, focusing in particular on the relationship between media and politics and on the evolution of freedom of the press. Then it develops a detailed comparative and longitudinal analysis of the three dimensions mentioned above. It concludes with some notes about the main empirical patterns identified. MEDIA IN SO U T HERN EUR OPE : T HE ORE T IC AL PER SPE C T I VE S AND EMPIRIC AL ANALY SE S

For decades, Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm’s (1956) Four Theories of the Press heavily influenced the conceptualization of the relationship between politics and the media. Their conceptualization reflected a dichotomy between a rich and democratic Western world and

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the rest of the world, in a political context in which the cleavage between dictatorships and democracies was very sharp. But this context was profoundly altered with the surge of the third wave of democratization (Huntington 1991). Democratic consolidation in southern and eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, as well as the emergence of innumerable hybrid regimes (Diamond 2002; Wigell 2008), asked for new theoretical contributions that moved away from this polarized and Eurocentric theoretical framework and toward a more comprehensive perspective. In 2000, two influential works looked at this new context. De-­ Westernizing Media Studies (Curran and Park 2000) questioned the tradition of comparative studies limited to Western countries (often the US and the UK), with a set of new perspectives on the media in other parts of the world. Published in the same year, Democracy and the Media: A Comparative Perspective (Gunther and Mughan 2000) addressed the role of the media in the context of both national democratic transition processes and consolidated democracies. Moreover, it became necessary to explore the variation of media system arrangements within the so-­called Western world. Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm (1956) had already found that within democracies there were several interesting variations, namely media systems that could be free from any state’s tutelage and just act autonomously in the search for the truth within a society of rational citizens (the libertarian approach) or systems that considered the media a public service, thus requiring some form of state regulation (the theory of social responsibility). Drawing on this work, Hallin and Mancini (2004) provided an updated and enriched historical-­comparative analysis, in which the media systems of eighteen Western European and North American nations were compared along four dimensions: the development of the press market; the degree of political parallelism (strength of the links between the media and political parties, something that in extreme cases would have each party represented by a particular newspaper or television channel); the level of journalists’ professionalization; and forms of state intervention. Hallin and Mancini (2004) were able to identify three different configurations of media systems: first, the liberal model, represented by the UK, Ireland, and the North American countries; then, the democratic corporatist model, typical of the Scandinavian countries and western Europe in general; and last, the polarized pluralist systems of

166  José Santana Pereira and Pedro Diniz de Sousa

southern Europe (Spain, France, Greece, Italy, and Portugal), a designation inspired by Sartori’s (1976) party system typology. This last type of system was characterized by weakly developed press markets, strong political parallelism between the media and parties, low levels of professionalization of journalists, and strong state intervention, inherited either from periods when censorship was the norm or from a centralizing state tradition. According to Hallin and Mancini (2004), the historical legacy of southern European countries, in particular the late development of capitalist industrialization and democracy, as well as protracted political conflict throughout most of the twentieth century, influenced the traits of their media systems, leading to poorly developed press markets. Their press systems were deeply focused on the political-­ideological struggle, polarized around parties, as well as extremely dependent on external actors, especially the state, something that inhibited the professionalization of journalists. However, the authors also emphasized the distinctive character of France, of northern Italian cities, and of Catalonia and the Basque Country, regions that featured higher levels of economic development and higher literacy, and consequently stronger press markets. Still, even there, high political parallelism and strong state intervention prevailed. During the 1980s and 1990s, some of the features of polarized pluralism declined considerably, bringing southern European media systems a bit closer to western and northern Europe and the United States (Hallin and Mancini 2004). This transformation was particularly evident in terms of market development and state intervention—dimensions of media systems that we do not explore in this chapter but that are comparatively analyzed elsewhere (Brüggemann et al. 2014; Santana Pereira 2015). Media markets underwent an unprecedented development, aided by strong investment, albeit not always in a sustained manner, as commercial losses have occurred since considerations of political influence, especially in Italy and Greece, still reigned. Private television and radio stations have proliferated, forming powerful media groups (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Padovani 2009; Nikolaidis 2015). However, southern Europe’s shortcomings were still evident by the late 2000s, particularly in Portugal (Santana Pereira 2015). Also, as Michael Brüggemann et al. (2014) point out, southern European states refrained from intervening

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in the media as much as in the past, as the increased power of media conglomerates and their new status as representatives of public opinion gave rise to a more balanced relationship with the state, which generally speaking backed away from instrumentalizing the media. In addition, democratic and economic development of southern European countries since the 1970s made the more important news­ papers become largely independent of political affiliation, commercially oriented, and defined by internal pluralism. This was the case of La Stampa and Corriere della Sera in Italy and of Público in Portugal. Television, always a sensitive arena because of the southern European tradition of state intervention, also underwent profound changes in all countries. A common trend was the opening of private channels, along with technological innovations, like cable, satellite, pay TV, and DTT. This trend began in France in 1982 and ten years later had extended to the remaining countries. In southern Europe, TV has reached an importance that the press never enjoyed, acquiring also a catch-­all and pluralistic propensity (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Still, a decade ago there were still traces of political parallelism in southern Europe (Santana Pereira 2015), and the adherence of the new channels to journalistic ethics was also limited because of savage deregulation (on the Portuguese case, see Traquina 1995) or commercial deluge (Hallin and Mancini 2004), an abrupt and unbound reaction to long decades of state control. Deregulation has occurred in all these countries but has been particularly strong in Italy, when the RAI-­ Mediaset duopoly was controlled by PM Silvio Berlusconi during his tenure in government. Also, in Greece an oligopoly with clear political connections, following an old clientelist tradition, was established (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos 2002; Padovani 2009; Nikolaidis 2015). Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) polarized pluralism model has been accused of ignoring variations within southern Europe. As Afonso Albuquerque (2012) and Nelson Traquina (2010) argued, this model does not fully apply to Portugal, a country where political parallelism has been lower and the media less involved in political conflicts than in the other countries. Brüggemann et al. (2014) also noted that the Portuguese case was more liberal than indicated by Hallin and Mancini. In their study, Portugal was grouped, not with the other southern European countries, but with the US, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In this case, Portugal’s divergence from southern Europe was mostly due

168  José Santana Pereira and Pedro Diniz de Sousa

to differences in journalistic professionalization (higher) and political parallelism (lower) (Brüggemann et al. 2014; see also Santana Pereira 2012, 2015; van Kempen 2007). Hallin and Mancini (2004) have also been accused of ignoring relevant comparative dimensions such as freedom of the press, a major pillar of democracy. The very foundations of democracy are called into question when the media are not free (Becker, Vlad, and Nusser 2007; Gunther and Mughan 2000; Norris 2009). T HE E VOLU T ION OF MEDIA S Y S T EMS IN SO U T HERN EUR OPE , 19 68–2014

In this section, we present the evolution of the media systems of southern European democracies along three main axes measured and operationalized using V-­Dem data: political-­partisan pluralism in the media; professional ethics of journalists; and freedom of the press. Whenever possible and relevant, V-­Dem longitudinal data is complemented by the use of other indicators that measure identical dimensions, derived from studies carried out by Freedom House, the European Media Systems Survey (EMSS, Popescu 2012), and the Media Pluralism Monitor (Brogi and Dobreva 2015; Brogi et al. 2016). Political and Party Pluralism in the Media

For Hallin and Mancini (2004), parallelism between media outlets and parties was a main feature of southern Europe. Political parallelism manifested itself in various ways, but crucial aspects were the media contents and ownership, the political connections of journalists, owners, and managers, and newspaper reading patterns being correlated to partisan preferences. Hetty van Kempen (2007) corroborated Hallin and Mancini’s interpretation of southern European countries as distinct from others on this matter but noted that Portugal was the only southern European country with levels of political parallelism below the European average, despite its founding revolutionary period, which was marked by extreme politicization of the press (Seaton and Pimlott 1983). These later findings have been corroborated by Traquina (2010), Brüggemann et al. (2014), and José Santana Pereira (2012, 2015).

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To the contrary, political parallelism in Spain has been evident. In the critical juncture of the transition to democracy in the 1970s, the press was considered to have played a crucial role, earning the epithet of Parlamento de Papel, or Paper Parliament (Giner 1983; Hallin and Mancini 2004). More recently, high levels of political parallelism could still be found in Spain (Brüggemann et al. 2014). In addition, Greece and Italy have been regarded as countries conforming to the traditional southern European model. Greece is the country in which the press has been most politicized, with the political instrumentalization of newspapers being common (Hallin and Mancini 2004). The main Italian newspapers also show a clear political tendency, except for titles such as La Stampa and Corriere della Sera. In television, the so-­called lottizzazione, which preceded the Second Republic and through which the three main political parties de facto controlled the three public television channels, is another sign of political parallelism (Padovani 2009). What can V-­Dem data tell us about these patterns? First, a warning is in order. Political parallelism presupposes, at the system level, political diversity (external pluralism). This can be achieved through the existence of politically engaged newspapers and televisions linked to different parties or sides of the ideological spectrum. However, it is common for a particular newspaper or television channel to include perspectives from different parties and ideologies or to remain essentially neutral (internal pluralism). If internal pluralism characterizes much of the media in a given system, political parallelism will be low. The V-­Dem data does not allow us to verify whether the levels of political pluralism are due to internal or external diversity and, therefore, if we are observing high levels of politicization or neutrality/diversity in different media outlets. It allows, however, the identification of general patterns of media pluralism at the macro level over time. The following analysis focuses on two dimensions. The first concerns the political pluralism of the media in general terms (the presence of different political perspectives); the second focuses on political-­partisan pluralism in more concrete terms (the presence of all main parties in the media and the degree of impartiality in the way they are treated). Regarding the presence of different political perspectives in the media, we can see that in 1968 there was a clear dichotomy between democracies and dictatorships, although with some peculiarities (figure 4.1). Portugal and

170  José Santana Pereira and Pedro Diniz de Sousa 3

2.5 2 1.5 1

0

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

0.5

Portugal

Spain

Italy

France

Greece

FIGURE 4.1.  Pluralism: Presence of diverse perspectives in the media. Scale—0: The major media represent only the government’s perspective. 1: The major media represent only the perspectives of the government and a government-­approved, semiofficial opposition party. 2: The major media represent a variety of political perspectives, but they systematically ignore at least one political perspective that is important in this society. 3: All perspectives that are important in this society are represented in at least one of the major media. Source: Authors’ elaboration, based on V-­Dem data (variable 13.5, Print/broadcast media perspectives, v2merange_osp, Coppedge et al. 2016a, 2016b).

Greece presented a bleak picture concerning diversity of perspectives in the media, especially when compared to France. The Spanish situation was slightly more favorable to diversity, while in Italy there was a tendency to systematically ignore the positions of some actors of the democratic system. However, democratization in Portugal, Spain, and Greece rapidly brought these countries closer to France, a country that has had a very high level of diversity of political perspectives throughout. In turn, Italy converged with France only in the early 1990s. Since then, southern Europe has displayed high levels of homogeneity and stability in terms of media pluralism, with a slightly less diversified picture in Italy. In the last years of Italy’s First Republic, some political perspectives were systematically neglected by the media (figure 4.1). This was due to the lottizzazione, whose guaranteed external pluralism was limited to the most important parties—the Christian Democrats, the Italian Socialist Party, and the Italian Communist Party (Padovani 2009). Since 1992, the Italian media have become slightly more pluralistic. This was mostly the result of the definitive liberalization of Italy’s audiovisual market, via the 1990 Mammi law and the possibility of broadcasting

Media and Politics  171 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1

0

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

0.5

Portugal

Spain

Italy

France

Greece

FIGURE 4.2.  Political-­partisan pluralism in the media. Scale—0: The print and broadcast media cover only the official party or candidates, or have no political coverage, or there are no opposition parties or candidates to cover. 1: The print and broadcast media cover more than just the official party or candidates, but all the opposition parties or candidates receive only negative coverage. 2: The print and broadcast media cover some opposition parties or candidates more or less impartially, but they give only negative or no coverage to at least one newsworthy party or candidate. 3: The print and broadcast media cover opposition parties or candidates more or less impartially, but they give an exaggerated amount of coverage to the governing party or candidates. 4: The print and broadcast media cover all newsworthy parties and candidates more or less impartially and in proportion to their newsworthiness. Source: Authors’ elaboration, based on V-­Dem data (variable 13.10, Media bias, v2mebias_osp, v6, Coppedge et al. 2016a, 2016b).

news on private television networks. Until then, only the national public TV broadcasting company (RAI) could broadcast news. The first private newscast was aired in 1991 by Canale 5, owned by Silvio Berlusconi’s media conglomerate Mediaset (D’Arma 2015). In sum, contrary to what has been suggested by other studies (e.g., Popescu 2012), and aside from Italy, diversity of perspectives in the media does not seem to be a problem in southern Europe. The scenario is somewhat different when we look at whether all relevant parties and candidates are present in the media and at the degree of impartiality in the way their activities or ideas are presented (figure 4.2). There is a clearer dichotomy between democracies and authoritarian regimes between 1968 and the mid-­1970s. However, in democratic France and Italy, the situation was far from perfect in terms of pluralism, since there was a clear trend toward excessive coverage of the incumbent

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party or parties, a fact consistent with the region’s tradition of state intervention in the media. However, the democratization processes of the 1970s led to a convergence in this indicator. Henceforth, the main difference became the stability of third-­wave democracies, which contrasts with some instability in the other countries under analysis. In Greece, Spain, and Portugal, almost the whole democratic period is marked by a fairly positive situation, with practically all the relevant political forces being present in the media and receiving unbiased coverage (figure 4.2). At the beginning of the 2010s, there was a small decrease in the levels of pluralism in Portugal and Spain, maybe related to the impact of the economic and financial crisis of the Great Recession. During the same period, Greek private television broadcasters openly legitimized the austerity policies implemented by the center-­ right government, limiting the public visibility of opponents (Nikolaidis 2015). In 2014, Greece showed a medium to high level of risk in terms of press freedom (Brogi and Dobreva 2015); it is possible that the same happened, albeit more subtly, in Portugal and Spain. In France, the situation was very positive over the decades under analysis: the market of ideas conveyed by the media featured high levels of political pluralism and impartiality. Still, two electoral years (1995 and 2007) fell somewhat below this high standard. In 1995, the French media tended to present the presidential election as a duel between two right-­wing candidates, the Neo-­Gaullists Jacques Chirac and Édouard Balladur, and to grant excessive attention to the latter, who was then prime minister, especially in the precampaign period (Goldey and Knapp 1996). Bias was also found during the 2007 presidential campaign, in which socialist candidate Ségolène Royal ran against the charismatic center-­right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who was considered to have benefited from hypervisibility in the media (Kuhn 2013). Finally, in Italy, impartiality and political-­partisan pluralism were high, although showing a moderate decline during center-­right and technocrat incumbencies in the Second Republic (1994–96, 2008–11) and a marked decrease during the second and third Berlusconi cabinets (2001–6)—a period in which the government strongly exerted control over the public network RAI (D’Arma 2015). In sum, the analysis of political pluralism in southern European media systems between 1968 and 2014 shows new democracies rapidly

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converging to the high French standards already existing in the 1970s, and with considerable stability from then on. Italy is an outlier, presenting systematically lower values in terms of pluralism of perspectives and greater variation throughout in terms of political-­party pluralism. In this country, pluralism seems to be dependent on who is in charge of the government. Journalism Ethics

A second distinctive feature of media systems is the degree of professionalization of journalists. Professionalization is here understood as the acceptance and adoption of a series of norms of conduct, ethics, and criteria to assess the work of journalists. Southern European journalism has been traditionally considered to be excessively focused on political elites, with whom journalists developed diffuse, clientelist, and instrumental relationships (Hallin and Mancini 2004). In the 1980s and 1990s, and in step with marketization of the media, there was a movement toward greater professionalization. Journalism university schools were created, and there was a great improvement in journalists’ status, via the support of strong unions or professional orders (Italy) (Hallin and Mancini 2004). In Portugal and France, there was also a greater regulation of the entry into the profession through Professional License Committees. Moreover, short-­lived experiments with journalist-­ managed newspapers in Portugal (1974–75), France (1968), and Italy (1970s) created a legacy of journalistic autonomy, embodied in editorial boards that maintained their prerogatives. This, however, did not prevent journalists in Spain, Italy, and Greece from being subjected to high levels of pressure from politicians (and in Portugal, from economic interests) (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Diniz de Sousa and Ferreira 2014). In sum, in the early 2010s levels of professionalization of journalists in southern Europe were relatively low, with Portugal being the closest to the European average among these five nations (Santana Pereira 2015). In this section, we focus on the ethics of journalists, a dimension that can be only partially associated with Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) concept of professionalization, since it is supported by only two indicators: the propensity to self-­censorship by journalists in making decisions about the coverage of politically sensitive issues, and openness

174  José Santana Pereira and Pedro Diniz de Sousa 3 2.5 2

1.5 1

0

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

0.5

Portugal

Spain

Italy

France

Greece

FIGURE 4.3.  Self-­censorship by journalists. Scale—0: Self-­censorship is complete and thorough. 1: Self-­censorship is common but incomplete. 2: There is self-­ censorship on a few highly sensitive political issues but not on moderately sensitive issues. 3: There is little or no self-­censorship among journalists. Source: Authors’ elaboration, based on V-­Dem data (variable 13.8, Media self-­censorship, v2meslfcen_ osp, Coppedge et al., 2016a, 2016b).

to corruption by governmental or nongovernmental entities. Let us begin by looking at self-­censorship (figure 4.3). In the mid-­1970s, self-­ censorship was more common in Italy than in France, probably because of the climate of fear and tension generated by years of political violence and terrorism. In the early 1980s, once the democratic transitions in southern Europe were completed and political violence declined in Italy, these four countries converged to positions closer to that of France. By the early 2010s, self-­censorship had become rare. However, convergence does not imply homogeneity, since the patterns identified in Greece and Italy are slightly worse. As in Spain and France, in Portugal self-­censorship has been rare. Recent surveys of Portuguese journalists confirmed the lack of self-­ censorship and other constraints of political origin (Rebelo 2011; Diniz de Sousa and Ferreira 2014). They revealed, however, a high level of vulnerability to extraeditorial pressure. Economic and advertising commitments—not political issues—created a wide range of pressures. These patterns were in turn reinforced by job insecurity in the context of a strong market crisis (Diniz de Sousa and Ferreira 2014). As for journalists’ corruption, we find very different patterns across the five cases before the processes of democratization (figure 4.4). From

Media and Politics  175 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1

0

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

0.5

Portugal

Spain

Italy

France

Greece

FIGURE 4.4.  Corruption of journalists. Scale—0: The media are so closely directed by the government that any such payments would be either unnecessary to ensure progovernment coverage or ineffective in producing antigovernment coverage. 1: Journalists, publishers, and broadcasters routinely alter news coverage in exchange for payments. 2: It is common, but not routine, for journalists, publishers, and broadcasters to alter news coverage in exchange for payments. 3: It is not normal for journalists, publishers, and broadcasters to alter news coverage in exchange for payments, but it happens occasionally, without anyone being punished. 4: Journalists, publishers, and broadcasters rarely alter news coverage in exchange for payments, and if it becomes known, someone is punished for it. Source: Authors’ elaboration, based on V-­Dem data (variable 13.11, Media corrupt, v2mecorrpt_osp, Coppedge et al. 2016a, 2016b).

1968 until the mid-­1970s, journalist corruption was rare and punished in France and was uncommon but unpunished in Italy. In the set of countries ruled by dictatorships, it was very common in Portugal and, to some degree, in Spain. In Greece, because of the harsh repression of the military regime, it was not even necessary. Democratization in these countries led to a convergence around lower levels of corruption, although not to a full convergence. In the early 2010s, there was a very positive situation throughout southern Europe, with a rare prevalence of such episodes and severe punishment of offenders (figure 4.4). Greece was slightly less repressive of journalistic corruption than the rest, but the gap was minimal. France, in turn, stood out for minimal levels of journalistic corruption throughout. Looking at longitudinal trends, since 1978 there has been stability across southern Europe, except in Italy. The Italian case seems to be, as in other dimensions, more volatile. The prevalence of corruption among

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journalists was slightly higher during the last years of the First Republic, namely until the turmoil of corruption scandals of 1992. Indeed, in 1993 there was a clear improvement, which occasionally deteriorated, in particular between 1994 and 1996 (during the first Berlusconi and Dini governments), and in 2001–6 (coinciding with the second and third Berlusconi cabinets). As of 2007, the situation had improved remarkably in Italy, with Greece becoming the country where attempts at corruption of journalists were less uncommon. Corruption of journalists can be further analyzed through the EMSS expert survey data of 2009–2010. Overall, these experts are much more skeptical of southern European media systems, depicting them more negatively. In comparative terms, however, the trend toward a higher prevalence of journalist corruption in Italy and Greece than in Portugal or France is confirmed (Popescu 2012). In sum, the analysis of these two aspects of journalistic ethics in the five southern European countries between 1968 and 2014 shows again the exceptional nature of the Italian case. Italy consistently scores below France, and sometimes democratic Portugal and Spain, evincing, as regards corruption of journalists, a vulnerability that is absent in other southern European democracies. On the other hand, we again note a quick convergence of new democracies, which rapidly caught up to France already in the 1970s. Still, Greece always fell short of the Iberian democracies. Freedom of the Press

Our last dimension, freedom of the press, is operationalized by three measures: the degree of direct or indirect attempts of government censorship; the degree of harassment of journalists by powerful governmental or nongovernmental actors (threats of prosecution, arrests, physical violence or murders); and the ability of the mainstream media to criticize the government, assuming a watchdog role by scrutinizing political officeholders on behalf of citizens. With regard to the first variable, the current situation in southern Europe is, from a normative standpoint, positive (figure 4.5). Although France is closer to the top of the scale than Greece, there is a clear homogeneity across southern Europe, especially since the 1980s. In fact, after

Media and Politics  177 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1

0

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

0.5

Portugal

Spain

Italy

France

Greece

FIGURE 4.5.  Government censorship. Scale—0: Attempts to censor are direct and routine. 1: Attempts to censor are indirect but nevertheless routine. 2: Attempts to censor are direct but limited to especially sensitive issues. 3: Attempts to censor are indirect and limited to especially sensitive issues. 4: The government rarely attempts to censor major media in any way, and when such exceptional attempts are discovered, the responsible officials are usually punished. Source: Authors’ elaboration, based on V-­Dem data (variable 13.2, Government censorship effort—media, v2mecenefm_osp, Coppedge et al. 2016a, 2016b).

the late 1970s, what we see in all these nations is that the government rarely attempted to censor the mainstream media. When it happened, offenders were punished. This description applies to the Portuguese case throughout the post-­transition period and to Spain after 1979. The tiny difference between the two Iberian countries, which favors Portugal, is due to some attempts at censorship in Spain related to issues such as Basque nationalist terrorism and the royal family (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Schulze-­Schneider 2009). Portugal’s better score relative to the other cases might be a long-­run positive consequence of the social revolutionary democratic transition, which favored the establishment of more thorough and lasting democratic practices in this country, including in the media, as Robert Fishman (2011) has argued. We will return to this argument below, as it cuts across several indicators. Interestingly, in 2013 and 2014, the index drops slightly in the Iberian Peninsula, which may be related to the impact and political repercussions of the Great Recession. In 1968, France displayed an instrumentalized media, subordinated to a very strong state, whose television the French president Georges Pompidou called the national and international “voice of France” (Hallin

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and Mancini 2004; Vedel 2009; Kuhn 2013). Nonetheless, the trend has been progressively satisfactory. After 1969, public television opened to advertising revenues and diversified its content. In 1982, legislation allowing private television and radio channels was passed in the parliament and an Haute Autorité de l’Audiovisuel largely independent of political power was created (Vedel 2009). After Sarkozy was replaced by socialist François Hollande as head of state in 2012, a law strengthening the independence of the Conséil Superiéur de l’Audiovisuel vis-­à-­vis the president was approved (Freedom House 2014). We thus consider the French path in recent years to be clearly positive. In Italy, censorship attempts, already scarce in the late 1960s, became even rarer from 1980 to 2000. Recall that it was in 1984–85, during Betino Craxi’s socialist government, that Italian legislation giving the monopoly of national broadcasts to the public television service (private stations could then broadcast only at the local and regional levels) was changed, paving the way for the reorganization of the audiovisual system in 1990 and the emergence of a national television alternative to RAI (D’Arma 2015), which resulted in an ongoing television duopoly, rare in Europe (Santana Pereira 2015). However, during the second and third Berlusconi governments (2001–6), censorship levels worsened slightly because of the appointment of biased heads of public news services. The promiscuity between public television news chief editors, under governmental control, and those of private channels owned by Berlusconi also increased, as it was shown that they were in frequent contact to discuss and arrange the contents of news broadcasts (Padovani 2009). Finally, Greece has been quite stable throughout its democratic period, deteriorating slightly from 2007 onward. Certain sensitive issues, such as the situation of the Macedonian community in the north of the country, led to censorship attempts (Freedom House 2006–8). Also, a law considered harmful to journalism was approved, imposing Greek as the official language of the media, limiting ethnic minorities’ access to the media, and forcing radios to introduce a twenty-­four-­hour schedule, thereby silencing a large number of small radio stations (Freedom House 2008, 2011). The data on harassment of journalists presents a similar picture to that described above (figure 4.6). The main difference is that the cleavage between democratic and authoritarian regimes prior to 1974 is not

Media and Politics  179 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1

0

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

0.5

Portugal

Spain

Italy

France

Greece

FIGURE 4.6.  Harassment of journalists. Scale—0: No journalists dare to engage in journalistic activities that would offend powerful actors because harassment or worse would be certain to occur. 1: Some journalists occasionally offend powerful actors, but they are almost always harassed or worse and eventually are forced to stop. 2: Some journalists who offend powerful actors are forced to stop, but others manage to continue practicing journalism freely for long periods of time. 3: It is rare for any journalist to be harassed for offending powerful actors, and if this were to happen, those responsible for the harassment would be identified and punished. 4: Journalists are never harassed by governmental or powerful nongovernmental actors while engaged in legitimate journalistic activities. Source: Author’s elaboration, based on V-­Dem data (variable 13.7, ­Harassment of journalists, v2meharjrn_osp, Coppedge et al. 2016a, 2016b).

as clear as in the previous case because Italy is ranked halfway between France and the Portuguese, Spanish, and Greek authoritarian regimes. The transition to democracy brought the latter countries closer to France (or even beyond, as in the case of Portugal until 1987), whereas during the second half of the 1970s the harassment of journalists was more frequent in Italy. The Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish situation stabilized immediately after the introduction of democratic regimes, whereas in Italy it was only from the 1980s onward, with the end of the “Years of Lead,” that the autonomy and security of journalists improved. Portugal, again, stands out positively in relation to the other southern European third-­wave democracies, which might be explained by the nature of the democratic transition’s impact on the media system (see Fishman 2011). Interestingly, in France, a qualitative leap occurred between 1986 and 1988 with the passing of the Freedom of Communication Act, which set the legal framework for a dual (public and private) television system and

180  José Santana Pereira and Pedro Diniz de Sousa 3

2.5 2 1.5

1

0

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

0.5

Portugal

Spain

Italy

France

Greece

FIGURE 4.7.  Criticism of the government in the media. Scale—0: No media outlet criticizes the government 1: Only a few marginal outlets do. 2: Some important outlets routinely criticize the government, but there are other important outlets that never do. 3: All major media outlets criticize the government at least occasionally. Source: Author’s elaboration, based on V-­Dem data (variable 13.4, Print/broadcast media critical, v2mecrit_osp, Coppedge et al. 2016a, 2016b).

the privatization of TF1 in 1987. This strongly limited the government’s influence on this arena and may have had an indirect and positive effect in ending the harassment of journalists (Vedel 2009). Since then, France has clearly shown a better performance than the other countries. Similarly, in Greece there were slight improvements in the levels of freedom and security of journalists after the deregulation of the television market in the late 1980s (Papathanassopoulos 1997). In general, the harassment of journalists engaged in legitimate activities has become rare in southern Europe, although the French case, over the last twenty-­five years, has been much more positive than the Italian. Finally, as regards media criticism of the government, southern Europe shows a pattern of gradual convergence (figure 4.7). In 1968, the differences between democracies and dictatorships were clear, despite some diversity among the latter group, with the Portuguese dictatorship being the least severe on this regard. In 1980, France, Portugal, and Spain were already close to an optimal situation—all media criticized the government at least from time to time. In the 1970s, there was an astounding leap in this indicator of press freedom for the new Iberian

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democracies, as well as a considerable improvement in the French case. The Greek convergence was also rapid, although the country remained below Iberia during much of its democratic history until 2007. The Italian case is particularly curious. Starting off in 1968 with the best classification, it came to the lowest ever from the late 1970s onward, only slightly improving in more recent years. In fact, the Italian media system moved away from a near-­perfect normative situation in 1994 (start of the first Berlusconi government), in 2001 (the year in which the television mogul again took the role of prime minister), and in 2008, with his third return to government. It is hardly surprising that channels owned by the head of government were less predisposed to broadcast criticisms of his performance. The situation improved during Romano Prodi’s government in 2007. But in 2008, with Berlusconi again in government, there was a return to the previous lower scores. Not until the final phase of his last term, marked by the deterioration of the Italian economic situation and the outbreak of several personal scandals involving the prime minister, did Italy return to a situation in which all the media were equally likely to criticize the government. These patterns are compatible with the analysis of media systems for 2009–10 carried out by Marina Popescu (2012), which measured the frequency with which the media effectively acted as watchdogs of government actions on behalf of citizens. According to their data, this was less frequent in Italy than in the other southern European countries. In short, the analysis of these three indicators again sheds light on the specificity of the Italian case. Italy has been reported by Freedom House as a country where the press is only partially free from political and economic constraints. Italy was classified as having a free press in only four of the first fourteen years of this century (2002, 2003, 2007, and 2008).1 Even in those years, it was ranked immediately below the threshold between nations with a free and a partially free press. In 2002 and 2003, according to Freedom House, legal threats to press freedom increased, and they remained moderately high for the next twelve years. Political constraints were also moderately high over these fourteen years (frequently ranked over 10 on a 40-­point scale). The same can be said about economic threats to journalists’ freedom, frequently ranked around 10 on a 30-­point scale. However, V-­Dem data partially contradicts this very harsh assessment.

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More negative still is Freedom House’s recent depiction of the current Greek situation. According to this source, persecution of journalists by legal means arguably has become systematic. The deep economic and social crises and the financial bailout had a strong impact upon the freedom of the press, with a dramatic increase in violence against journalists by the government, by the neo-­Nazi party Golden Dawn, and by common citizens, making the country fall fifty-­six positions in the world ranking (Freedom House 2012–14; Nikolaidis 2015). However, at least until 2012, V-­Dem data does not corroborate this alarmist picture. Finally, Portugal is systematically in the top positions, often above the other third-­wave democracies, and sometimes even above France. Again, this may be explained by the modes of transition to democracy. According to Fishman (2011, 2019), revolutionary processes of democratization, such as the Portuguese between 1974 and 1975—because they involve a reversal in hierarchies and a disruptive and generalized affirmation of new cultural and symbolic practices—lead to the development of more consolidated democratic practices in the long term, in contrast with transition processes controlled by the elites, as in Spain and Greece. Tiago Fernandes (2014) also argued that in the long run the revolution produced a stronger civil society, including robust professional associations of journalists. This may explain the Portuguese success in freedom of the press. Indeed, the Carnation Revolution of 1974 was deeply marked by the ideal of freedom (Seaton and Pimlott 1983), by the quick adoption of liberal legislation regarding press freedom, and by the affirmation of journalists’ autonomy in newsrooms. This chapter presented a longitudinal and comparative analysis of southern European media systems over the last five decades. The analysis of V-­Dem data evinces a rapid convergence from the mid-­to late 1970s to the mid-­2010s and a relative homogeneity throughout the democratic periods. This finding partially corroborates Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) view that the five countries formed a cohesive group. However, distinct patterns also emerged—often negatively classifying the Italian case and positively depicting Portugal and France, and only rarely corroborating a clear distinction between old and new democracies. In longitudinal terms, there is strong stability in Portugal, Spain, Greece, and France, and some instability in Italy.

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It is in fact necessary to stress the distinctive character of Italy, especially when compared to the more recent democracies of Portugal and Spain. Italy apparently is the most problematic case in the region. In the four decades under analysis, the freedom of the press was partially limited, continuing a tradition of instrumentalization of the press by political power holders, achieved also through the manipulation of legislation and the use of judicial litigation against journalists. But other factors were also relevant: in the 1970s, internal terrorism; in the late 1980s, the widespread political corruption that would bring down the First Republic; and from the mid-­1990s to the early 2010s, effective political control of the press resulting from the rise of a media mogul to the premiership (D’Arma 2009; Padovani 2009). In fact, the negative effects of the Berlusconi era, notably during his second and third governments (2001 to 2006), are reflected in V-­Dem indicators. Attempts at government censorship became more direct, the spectrum of government-­critical media narrowed, and the media became slightly more biased against opposition parties. Several legislative changes after the end of the lottizzazione also created a legal vacuum that Berlusconi took advantage of in order to create a situation that inhibited criticism of his government (Padovani 2009). In sum, the Italian media system seems to have been heavily affected by the political context, contrasting in this way with the strong stability in the other countries, where visible ups and/or downs in indicators are mainly related to regulatory changes, such as laws governing the audiovisual market, the approval of new constitutions, or highly mediatized and competitive elections. Freedom House goes even further, considering Italy, between 2004 and 2014, to have had an only partially free press, which is unprecedented in democratic western Europe. In contrast to Italy’s negative exceptionalism, the Portuguese and French cases stand out. France displayed very positive patterns in most indicators analyzed in this chapter. Portugal, in spite of its much lower GDP per capita and lower education levels, is, along with France, as the best southern European country in terms of freedom of the press and journalistic ethics (though here being close to Spain). This data seems to corroborate Fishman’s (2011) argument about the long-­term effects of democratization through social revolution, developed precisely from the Portuguese experience. In his view, the media played a crucial role

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in generalizing new cultural and symbolic practices and was a major driving engine of democratic culture, enabling a process of “national conversation” in which all actors participated effectively, from political elites to the most disadvantaged strata of the population. Moreover, the media were one institution in which lasting democratic practices most clearly took root. The strong reaction to censorship, triggered by the revolution, along with the processes analyzed by Fishman (2011; see also Voltmer 2013), fomented the professional autonomy of journalists, with the emergence of strong editorial boards and unions and a relatively independent public regulatory body similar to that of the French. It should be noted, however, that in recent surveys Portuguese journalists have declared that they suffer important limitations in their freedom through pressures arising from business and a fragile labor market (Diniz de Sousa and Ferreira 2014). Interestingly, the Greek democratic transition did not undermine the strong linkages between political elites and the media inherited from the authoritarian past, despite the extraordinary development of its media market, in step with the country’s economic growth and democratic consolidation (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos 2002; Papatheodorou and Machin 2003). Thus the different democratization modes created a certain degree of heterogeneity across the new southern European democracies of Portugal, Greece, and Spain. In any case, our analysis shows that both southern Europe’s established democracies and its third-­wave democracies have, from the late 1960s to the early 2010s, evolved toward displaying strong and independent media systems. Southern Europe’s heavy historical legacy was apparently overcome, a process that paved the way for high levels of political pluralism, journalistic ethics, and freedom of the press.

NOT E 1.  The “Freedom of the Press” index ranges from 0 (most free) to 100 (least free) and sorts countries yearly into three categories: free, partly free, or not free. Reports are based on expert surveys, which classify dozens of indicators grouped into three great areas: legal, political, and economic.

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REF ERENCE S Albuquerque, Afonso. 2012. “On Models and Margins: Comparative Media Models Viewed from a Brazilian Perspective.” In Comparing Media Systems: Beyond the Western World, edited by Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini, 72–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, Lee B., Tudor Vlad, and Nancy Nusser. 2007. “An Evaluation of Press Freedom Indicators.” International Communication Gazette 69 (1): 5–28. Brogi, Elda, and Alina Dobreva. 2015. Monitoring Media Pluralism in Europe: Testing and Implementation of the Media Pluralism Monitor, 2014. Policy Report. Florence: Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute. Brogi, Elda, Lisa Ginsborg, Alina Ostling, Pier Luigi Parcu, and Maja Simunjak. 2016. Monitoring Media Pluralism in Europe: Testing and Implementation of the Media Pluralism Monitor, 2015. Policy Report. Florence: Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute. Brüggemann, Michael, Sven Engesser, Florin Büchel, Edda Humprecht, and Laia Castro. 2014. “Hallin and Mancini Revisited: Four Empirical Types of Western Media Systems.” Journal of Communication 64:1037–65. Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Staffan I. Lindberg, Svend-­Erik Skaaning, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Frida Andersson, et al. 2016a. V-­Dem Codebook v6. University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy (V-­Dem) Project. www​.v​-dem​.net​/data​/dataset​-archive. Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Staffan I. Lindberg, Svend-­Erik Skaaning, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Frida Andersson, et al. 2016b. V-­Dem Dataset v6. University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy (V-­Dem) Project. www​.v​-dem​.net​/data​/dataset​-archive. Curran, James, and Mvung-­Jin Park. 2000. De-­Westernizing Media Studies. London: Routledge. D’Arma, Alessandro. 2009. “Broadcasting Policy in Italy’s ‘Second Republic’: National Politics and European Influences.” Media Culture Society 31 (5): 769–86. ———. 2015. Media and Politics in Contemporary Italy: From Berlusconi to Grillo. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Diamond, Larry. 2002. “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes.” Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 21–35. Diniz de Sousa, Pedro, and Vanda Ferreira. 2014. “As pressões extraeditoriais sobre os jovens jornalistas portugueses.” In As novas gerações de jornalistas em Portugal, edited by José Rebelo, 83–116. Lisbon: Mundos Sociais.

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Fernandes, Tiago. 2014. “Rethinking Pathways to Democracy: Civil Society in Portugal and Spain, 1960s–2000s.” Democratization 22 (6): 1074–1104. Fishman, Robert. 2011. “Democratic Practice after the Revolution: The Case of Portugal and Beyond.” Politics and Society 39 (2): 233–67. ———. 2019. Democratic Practice: Origins of the Iberian Divide in Political Inclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freedom House. 2002–14. “Freedom of the Press” indexes and country reports. Publication archives. https://​freedomhouse​.org​/reports​/publication​ -archives. Giner, Juan. 1983. “Journalists, Mass Media and Public Opinion in Spain.” In The Press and the Rebirth of the Iberian Democracy, edited by Kenneth Maxwell, 33–54. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Goldey, David, and Andrew Knapp. 1996. “The French Presidential Election of 23 April–7 May 1995.” Electoral Studies 15 (1): 97–109. Gunther, Richard, and Anthony Mughan. 2000. Democracy and the Media: A Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hallin, Daniel C., and Paolo Mancini. 2004. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hallin, Daniel C., and Stelyanos Papathanassopoulos. 2002. “Political Clientelism and the Media: Southern Europe and Latin America in Comparative Perspective.” Media, Culture and Society 24 (2): 175–95. Huntington, Samuel. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late 20th Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Kuhn, Raymond. 2013. “The Media and the Executive in France: An Unequal Power Relationship.” European Journal of Communication 28 (2): 122–35. Nikolaidis, Aris. 2015. “The Impact of Austerity on the Greek News Media and Public Sphere.” Working Paper 12, Political Economy Research Centre, University of London. Norris, Pippa. 2009. “Comparative Political Communications: Common Frameworks or Babelian Confusion?” Government and Opposition 44 (3): 321–40. Padovani, Cinzia. 2009. “Pluralism of Information in the Television Sector in Italy: History and Contemporary Conditions.” In Press Freedom and Pluralism in Europe: Concepts and Conditions, edited by Andrea Czepek, Melanie Hellwig, and Eva Novak, 289–304. Bristol: Intellect. Papathanassopoulos, Stylianos. 1997. “The Politics and the Effects of the Deregulation of Greek Television.” European Journal of Communication 12 (3): 351–68.

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Papatheodorou, Fotini, and David Machin. 2003. “The Umbilical Cord That Was Never Cut: The Post-­dictatorial Intimacy between the Political Elite and the Mass Media in Greece and Spain.” European Journal of Communication 18 (1): 31–54. Popescu, Marina. 2012. European Media Systems Survey 2010: Results and Docu­ mentation. Colchester: Department of Government, University of Essex. www​.mediasystemsineurope​.org. Rebelo, José. 2011. Ser jornalista em Portugal. Lisbon: Gradiva. Santana Pereira, José. 2012. “Media Systems and Information Environments. A Comparative Approach to the Agenda-­Setting Hypothesis.” PhD diss., European University Institute, Florence. ———. 2015. “Variety of Media Systems in Third-­Wave Democracies.” In Media and Politics in New Democracies: Europe in a Comparative Perspective, edited by Jan Zielonka, 231–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. “The Portuguese Media System and the Normative Roles of the Media: A Comparative View.” Análise Social, no. 221: 780–801. Sartori, Giovanni. 1976. Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schulze-­Schneider, Ingrid. 2009. “The Freedom of the Spanish Press.” In Press Freedom and Pluralism in Europe: Concepts and Conditions, edited by Andrea Czepek, Melanie Hellwig, and Eva Novak, 275–88. Bristol: Intellect. Seaton, Jean, and Ben Pimlott. 1983. “The Portuguese Media in Transition.” In The Press and the Rebirth of the Iberian Democracy, edited by Kenneth Maxwell, 93–115. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Siebert, Fred S., Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm. 1956. Four Theories of the Press. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Traquina, Nelson. 1995. “Portuguese Television: The Politics of Savage Deregu­lation.” Media, Culture and Society 17 (2): 223–38. ———. 2010. Preface to Sistemas de media: Estudo comparativo. Três modelos de comunicação e política, by Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini, 11–13. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte. van Kempen, Hetty. 2007. “Media-­Party Parallelism and Its Effects: A Cross-­ national Comparative Study.” Political Communication 24 (3): 303–20. Vedel, Thierry. 2009. “Pluralism in the French Broadcasting System: Between the Legacy of History and the Challenges of New Technologies.” In Press Freedom and Pluralism in Europe: Concepts and Conditions, edited by Andrea Czepek, Melanie Hellwig, and Eva Novak, 261–74. Bristol: Intellect.

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Voltmer, Katrin. 2008. “Comparing Media Systems in New Democracies: East Meets South Meets West.” Central European Journal of Communication 1:23–40. ———. 2013. The Media in Transitional Democracies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wigell, Mikael. 2008. “Mapping ‘Hybrid Regimes’: Regime Types and Concepts in Comparative Politics.” Democratization 15 (2): 230–50.

FIVE

Subnational Democracy Pedro T. Magalhães

The countries of southern Europe studied in this volume—France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece—have varied significantly in their democratic development. While France, despite the various authoritarian interregnums in its history from 1789 to the Vichy regime of 1940–44, emerged as one of the cradles of democracy in the modern era, Spain, Portugal, and Greece had stable democratic regimes only in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Italy, in its turn, definitely consolidated its democracy, which had been faltering or nonexistent from the Risorgimento to the end of World War II, only in the years 1945–48. Such differences, however, must not obscure the fact that these countries shared a common legacy as regards political-­administrative structures and the territorial organization of the state. To look at the issue of local and regional democracy across southern Europe, as opposed to a strictly national perspective, leads us to point out the persistence of a highly centralized state. This model spread from revolutionary and Napoleonic

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France to the whole of Europe, and it took particularly strong root in the south of the continent. This chapter provides a critical, interpretive and historically contextualized reading of the expert data collected by the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-­Dem) on the subnational dimension of southern European democracies. We aim to understand the convergence to a relatively high pattern of subnational democratic autonomy in all the countries considered, which after the 1970s reversed a nineteenth-­century legacy that had been wholly unfavorable to local and regional democratic autonomy. Yet we also focus on national variations and explain why some countries have developed stronger and more autonomous local and/or regional democratic systems than others. We will also show that the countries where subnational government was adopted in the first wave of decentralization of the 1960s and ’70s (France, Portugal, and Spain) were the ones that ended up having relatively robust and autonomous local and/or regional democratic systems. Conversely, the countries where the most significant decentralizing measures were introduced only in the second wave of reform (the Great Recession of 2008–14), Italy and Greece, maintained a legacy of relatively low local democratic autonomy. Thus the context of (re)democratization during the long 1970s has served the cause of subnational democracy in southern Europe better than the context of Europeanization and austerity of the 2010s. We will develop this argument through a comparative analysis of the historical development of local and regional governments in southern Europe. This comparative approach will focus upon three distinct temporal contexts: (1) a common nineteenth-­century state-­building legacy, which obstructed the development of subnational democracy; (2) a first wave of challenges to this legacy in the context of (re)democratization and strong popular mobilizations from the late 1960s to the early 1980s; (3) a second wave of decentralization driven by imperatives of efficiency, economic competitiveness, and European integration, from the mid-­1990s to the present. This reading also aims to explain the variation shown by V-­Dem data by supplying it with concrete historical substance.

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T HE SUBNAT IONAL DIMENSION: DATA AND HYP OT HE SE S ON SO U T HERN EUR OPE

Democratic government at the subnational level is a crucial feature of most democratic countries. If democratic government may be conceivable merely at a national level, there is also no contemporary high-­ quality democracy without democratically elected subnational organs, endowed with a certain degree of autonomy. There can be no good democracy without a subnational democratic system of local and/or regional elected and autonomous political bodies. A hypothetical state where the political participation of citizens was restricted to the democratic election of national organs would not cease to be a democracy, at least according to the most common definition of the term. But it would be a low-­quality democracy, as the distance between rulers and ruled would be too wide for citizens’ preferences and choices to be able to determine political decisions and policies. The purpose of local and/or regional democratic government is precisely to shorten the (ultimately insurmountable) gap between government and the governed by including citizens in the choice of the representatives who more immediately and directly make choices that affect their daily lives. From this point of view, the existence of democratically elected local and/or regional governments endowed with wide powers makes democracy more responsive to citizens’ immediate concerns. The V-­Dem Project did not fail to consider this subnational dimension, bringing together a set of crucial indicators measuring the presence of elected local/regional governments and their autonomy vis-­à-­vis nonelected local/regional political bodies (Coppedge et al. 2015, 42–43). V-­Dem indexes for southern Europe suggest that by the close of the twentieth century, despite the strong centralistic tradition that had shaped their political-­administrative history, the countries of the region converged to a relatively high level of subnational democratic government. In effect, the trend in the data shows that the Napoleonic legacy has been largely overcome. The local government index (figure 5.1), which measures the autonomy of elected municipal governments, shows that the third-­wave democracies of Portugal, Spain, and Greece converged

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Local Government Index 1

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FIGURE 5.1.  Local government index. The index aggregates indicators on the existence of elected local governments and their degree of autonomy from nonelected bodies at the local level. The scale ranges from 0 to 1, resulting from the multiplication of the indicator for the existence of elected local governments (reconfigured to 0–1) by the indicator for their degree of autonomy from nonelected bodies at the local level (adapted to 0–1). Values close to 1 indicate that local governments are directly elected, or accountable to an elected assembly, and that they have wide autonomy from nonelected bodies at the local level. Conversely, values close to 0 refer to nonelected local authorities, or to those that, being elected, are subordinate to nonelected political bodies at the local level (Coppedge et al. 2015, 42, 84–85). Source: V-­Dem_v12.

rapidly to the level of their older counterparts, France and Italy, in the aftermath of their democratic transitions in the 1970s. Moreover, Portugal and Spain have even overtaken Italy and moved closer to the level of municipal autonomy of France. Greece, in turn, converged with Italy until the autonomy of Italian local governments rose slightly in the context of the institutional reforms of the early 1990s. There are thus two distinct groups of countries. On the one hand, France, Portugal, and Spain show high scores, not far from the scale’s upper limit; on the other, Italy and (especially) Greece have lower values. While the autonomy of local government is robust in France, Portugal, and Spain, in Italy and (especially) Greece local governments have frequently suffered from the interference of nonelected bodies.1 The regional government index (figure 5.2) assesses the existence and autonomy of an intermediate stratum of democratic government between the local and the national levels. This stratum is crucial to

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FIGURE 5.2.  Regional government index. The index aggregates indicators on the existence of elected regional governments and their degree of autonomy from nonelected bodies at the regional level. The scale ranges from 0 to 1, resulting from the multiplication of the indicator for the existence of elected regional governments (reconfigured to 0–1) by the indicator for their degree of autonomy from nonelected bodies at the regional level (adapted to 0–1). Values close to 1 indicate that regional governments are directly elected, or accountable to an elected assembly, and that they have wide autonomy from nonelected bodies at the regional level. Conversely, values close to 0 generally refer to nonelected regional authorities, or to those that, being elected, are subordinate to nonelected political bodies at the regional level (Coppedge et al. 2015, 43, 82–83). Source: V-­Dem_v12.

understand the trajectories of southern European countries, for it was at such an intermediate level of territorial governance that the Napoleonic model imposed the prefectures, a system of centrally appointed political-­ administrative bodies. The fact that all countries started the series with very low scores indicates the persistence of the Napoleonic legacy until the late 1960s. However, by 2014, all countries, except for Portugal, where such a nationwide intermediate stratum is still lacking (only the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and Azores have an elected regional

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government), have reached the upper third of the scale, thus appearing to break away from the historical legacy of strong centralization. The crucial period here seems to be the 1960s–’70s, when the democratic transitions occurred in Greece, Portugal, and Spain and a cycle of popular mobilization and protest for local and regional autonomy started in France and Italy. The other period of change began in the 1990s, when southern European nations had to respond to challenges related to European integration and to the financial sustainability of their state administrations. This chapter argues that it was in those countries where subnational systems of government were most firmly established in the first period of (re)democratization (France, Spain, and Portugal, in contrast to Italy and Greece) that relatively stronger and autonomous regional and/or local governments were established in the long run. Our reading differs from a strictly legal-­formalist approach, which by looking only at the way subnational governments are defined in constitutional law (Lijphart 1999) would group France, Portugal, and Greece as a single set of countries, characterized by centralism (unitary systems), and Italy and Spain as another set (decentralized federal systems). The comparative-­ historical approach developed in this chapter challenges such a division. A CENT R AL IS T IC L E G AC Y: T HE NAP OL E ONIC S TAT E MODEL IN SO U T HERN EUR OPE

The state is one of the main creations and political achievements of Western modernity (Skinner 1989). Max Weber (1946, 78) defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Beyond such a general definition, however, the history of the state in Europe was characterized by diverse national experiences and intellectual traditions. There were two broad state traditions, the Anglo-­Saxon and the Continental. In Great Britain (and the United States), the notion of state was often replaced by, or used interchangeably with, that of government, whereas in Continental Europe it was an entity endowed with legal personality. Moreover, the Continental tradition itself displayed enough internal diversity to warrant the construction of subtypes. Within that

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tradition, the French and German conceptions of the state were usually juxtaposed. In succinct and admittedly simplistic terms, the French tradition emphasized the state as an expression of the general will or of the will of the people, whereas the German was based on an organic and corporative idea (Dyson 1980). These different national types and traditions influenced the different ways in which state institutions related to populations and the territory, connecting the political centers with their respective peripheries. To be sure, the literature on this subject offers many alternative typologies. Some authors emphasize the contrast between northern and southern Europe, with the former characterized by a strict formal-­administrative control exerted by the political centers, and the latter dominated by informal, clientelistic relations at the local level (Goldsmith 1996; Page 1991). Notwithstanding the relevance of the formal-­informal dichotomy, the typology inspired by Kenneth Dyson’s (1980) historical-­philosophical study maintains its heuristic value. John Loughlin and B. Guy Peters (1997) have reinterpreted Dyson’s model in order to generate three broad patterns. One is the Anglo-­Saxon tradition, characterized by a pragmatic and casuistic relation of the state to its territory. Another type is the French tradition, with a strong centralizing and homogenizing state whose power emanates directly from the political capital to the peripheries. Finally, there is the German tradition, where the state is organized around the principles of decentralization (federalism) and of organic territorial cooperation between its constituent units.2 The historical reality of southern European state building, of course, was not exempt from traces of hybridity that do not fit within the strict limits of any ideal type. Nevertheless, one may posit that the French model of centralization and homogenization constituted a common southern European legacy, whose adoption during the nineteenth century was meant to assert the territorial integrity of the nation against secessionisms and backward, premodern particularisms. The French model was the historical result of three bureaucratic dynamics, namely the rise of royal absolutism, the Revolution of 1789, and the Napoleonic Empire. The trend toward administrative centralization was well on its way already before 1789 (Tocqueville 1856, 50–60), but the revolution gave it a further impetus, while Napoleon disseminated the model across the European continent. In fact, at the

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outbreak of the revolution, the characteristics of this model were already largely delineated, as was the hegemony of Paris over most of the French national territory. Still, the revolution imparted a renewed vigor to the centralizing drive and rationalist zeal of central government elites, who sought to suppress regional particularisms of all sorts at all costs. The complex plethora of local and regional institutions inherited from feudalism was shattered. At the local level, the communes emerged as the modern successors of the medieval parishes. Between them and the central power, a new territorial subdivision was created, the departments.3 Weights and measures were standardized across the territory, as was the judicial system, thus putting an end to the autonomy of the local courts (parlements). A system of officials representing the central government in each department was instituted in the Napoleonic age (the prefects). Finally, during the Third Republic (1870–1939), the establishment of a national education system was a crucial instrument in suppressing the last remnants of regional languages and dialects. During the nineteenth century, this model of centralized administration was generally held to represent a pinnacle of modernity. The widespread fascination it exercised over governmental and bureaucratic elites was quite strong in southern Europe, as it could easily serve the specific goals of state builders, even of those who did not subscribe to the ideological tenets of the French Revolution and had opposed French imperial expansion. The French model, indeed, seemed to offer the best solutions to the particular challenges that national political elites in southern Europe faced. Trends toward further centralization in territorially consolidated monarchies (Portugal and Spain) were reinforced, but the model also offered help to those who were struggling to assert the very existence of a unitary nation-­state against both internal and external resistance (Italy and Greece). There was, of course, a huge gap between the Napoleonic ­model’s ideal of centralization of and its actual workings. The centralism of French constitutional and administrative law at the same time concealed diffuse, yet deeply entrenched, practices of informal localism. In practice, the intermediary role of the so-­called grands notables was essential for the effective exercise of state control over regions and local communities. By securing the loyalty of populations to central authority, these notables managed to become the main intermediaries who channeled resources

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from the central state to the localities, thus creating a system where they were virtually indispensable (Grémion 1976). The privileged position of the local notables was further enhanced by the possibility of accumulating offices at different levels, which meant that political careers at the national level did not require one to relinquish local offices (Cole 2011, 309). Quite on the contrary, these offices were probably the most solid basis upon which to sustain larger, national political ambitions. Moreover, state control over the territory was still rather fragmented during the nineteenth century, as it was simultaneously exercised by the regional and local branches of the various national ministries and by the bureaucratic corps of the prefectures. The consequence was a complex web of parallel and often overlapping competences (Dupuy and Thoenig 1985). The stark contrast between formal centralization and informal localism during the nineteenth century also characterized the other southern European countries, where the resilience of local clientelistic networks and patrimonial legacies was even stronger than in France. Although liberal constitutional law arrived relatively early to the Iberian Peninsula, liberalism as a political movement, and as a factor of social change, remained weak throughout the nineteenth century, as it was never able to supplant the resistance of the church and the aristocracy. State-­building processes were thus captured by authoritarian and conservative forces, who largely succeeded in preserving the hegemony of oligarchic elites at both the national and the local levels (Fusi 1990; Tavares de Almeida 1991, 97–140). States of exception, suspensions of civic rights, political violence, and military interventions to restore order were frequent, and so was electoral fraud. The major difference between the two Iberian countries as regards territorial issues was the emergence in Spain, by the late nineteenth century, of nationalist movements in the more industrialized and economically developed regions of Catalonia and the Basque Country. These regions exerted decentralizing pressures on the central state, which found political expression in the brief and failed democratic experiences of the First (1873–74) and Second (1931–39) Republics (Aja 2001, 230). In Portugal, on the contrary, there was no serious challenge to centralization. Federalist and Iberist ideas did arise within the Portuguese republican movement, but they remained marginal. In fact, the administrative and territorial structure of the constitutional monarchy, based on

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prefectures (distritos), municipalities, and civil parishes, remained intact during the First Republic (1910–26) (Oliveira 1996b). In the Italian and Greek cases, the adoption of the Napoleonic model must be seen against the backdrop of major external and internal threats to their state-­building processes. In Italy, institutional legacies played a key role. The Kingdom of Piedmont-­Sardinia, the legal predecessor of the Kingdom of Italy, adopted the French model, as had the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the South. Yet the political elites of unified Italy still feared latent centrifugal forces hidden beneath the rhetoric of unification. The population of the new kingdom, for the most part, spoke mutually incomprehensible dialects (Putnam 1993, 18), and both masses and elites, especially in the agrarian South, lacked a sense of shared nationhood. In fact, Italian unification was a product of military conquest rather than popular mobilization. Ultimately, the adoption of a rigidly centralized territorial model was seen as a necessity, to the detriment of the federalist alternatives proposed by some of the leaders of the Risorgimento (Ziblatt 2006). In Greece, the irredentist movement that led the rebellion against the Ottoman Empire saw in the Franco-­Napoleonic model the best means of ensuring the territorial integrity of the new state. One must recall that, at the time of its independence, in 1821, the Greek territory comprised only about a third of its current area. The remaining two-­ thirds were gradually incorporated until just after World War II, always amid tensions with its Turkish, Bulgarian, and, more recently, Macedonian neighbors (Loughlin 2001, 271–72). Centralization meant, for Greece, an attempt to break with the complex patchwork of autonomist and localist traditions typical of the societies that lived under Ottoman rule (Hlepas and Getimis 2011, 411). Yet this legacy persisted at the level of political culture. Patronage and clientelistic practices imbued the representative institutions and administrative models borrowed from Continental liberalism. In this sense, the Greek experience, with its “oligarchic parliamentarism” and inefficient public administration, bears striking resemblances to the Iberian cases during the long nineteenth century (Mouzelis 1983). Thus national political elites adopted the Napoleonic model across southern Europe. At the same time, this gave rise to a persisting, unsolvable tension between the formal institutional design of centralization

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and the various informal practices that resisted it at the local level. Despite such imperfect implementation—or perhaps precisely because of the malleability it afforded—the model was not seriously questioned until the second half of the twentieth century. The reasons for such persistence are manifold. In France, although municipal democracy had existed since the Third Republic, the focus of politics and governance remained at the national level. Also, after World War II, the large social consensus around a new model of welfare capitalism, based on Fordist industrial policy, seemed indeed to require national solutions and a bureaucratic effort guided by the ministerial centers of government. This, of course, reinforced the preponderance of Paris over the peripheral “desert” (Gravier 1958). Similar processes were occurring in Italy, but the persistence of the Napoleonic model was also due to lingering concerns about national unity. In the words of Simona Piattoni and Marco Brunazzo (2011, 333), both the post–World War II party system, based on the informal consensus between Christian Democrats and communists, and nineteenth-­century clientelism (and, to an extent, also fascism) “can be seen as different pathologies that ensued from the single-­minded pursuit of unity at all costs.” Finally, in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, the establishment of right-­wing authoritarian regimes in the interwar period further deepened state centralization. Any instance of subnational autonomy was eliminated (Oliveira 1996a; Sanz Hoya 2008; Hlepas 2012). BRE AK ING AWAY F R OM T HE NAP OL E ONIC MODEL , PAR T I: DE CENT R AL I Z AT ION AND E X PERIENCE S OF (RE )DEMO CR AT I Z AT ION, 19 68–8 3

In the late 1960s, the post–World War II consensus around the welfare state slowly began to erode in the more industrialized countries of western Europe. First, its material foundations were called into question by the onset of stagflation, the simultaneous occurrence of anemic economic growth and relatively high unemployment (stagnation) with a generalized rise in the prices of goods and services (inflation). This phenomenon not only seemed to disprove the predominant macroeconomic orthodoxy, which held that recession and inflation were mutually

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exclusive, but also carried heavy budgetary costs for the state. On the other hand, a shift in the expectations and values of citizens in advanced Western democracies began to make itself felt. A narrowly materialistic understanding of well-­being was gradually revised so as to include values like individual autonomy and expression and the defense of the environment. This posed a challenge to the agendas of the dominant political parties. Their unconvincing responses led to growing disenchantment with the main representative institutions and to a renewed interest in alternative, more participatory and locally based, forms of democracy (Blinder 1979; Pateman 1970). Although the main theorist of the so-­called postmaterialist shift spoke of a “silent revolution” (Inglehart 1977), it makes sense to see in the Parisian student revolt of May 1968 one of its most dramatic and audible manifestations. True, a large part of the French student movement was drawn to (highly idealized versions of ) contemporary Marxism (Trotskyism, Maoism, Titoism, Enverism, etc.). In practice, however, the ideas of autonomy, self-­organization, and cultural emancipation conveyed by the movement reflected the ongoing transformation of values and expectations of Western democratic publics.4 Ideas of autonomy and self-­organization were applied to schools and universities by students, and by workers to factories and plants. Others challenged the centralized administrative structure of the French state. It was also not a coincidence that the resurgence of autonomist movements in the historical French regions of Brittany, Corsica, and Occi­ tanie occurred only after the postwar consensus around the centralized welfare state had been called into question. The combination of the quest for industrial self-­management with the push for state decentralization was a hallmark of the so-­called French second left, which portrayed itself as an alternative to the programs of central economic planning advocated by the two main parties on the left, the socialists (French Section of the Workers’ International [SFIO] / Socialist Party [PS]) and the communists (French Communist Party [PCF]). This group initially was relatively marginal and rather heterogeneous. Michel Rocard was its leading figure. In 1960, Rocard had founded the Unified Socialist Party (PSU), which grouped together dissidents from the socialist and communist parties. The PSU also attracted progressive Catholics (like Jacques Delors) and established ties with the French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT), a labor union that

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originated in left-­wing Catholic circles but had abandoned its confessional orientation in the mid-­1960s. This party, however, was an electoral failure and eventually had to set aside the ambition of replacing the forces already established on the left. Thus, along with some fellow travelers, Rocard joined François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party in 1974 (Hamon and Rotman 1980, 1982). Despite being critical of the common program of 1972, on the basis of which the electoral alliance between socialists and communists was established, the second left nonetheless supported Mitterrand’s presidential candidacy. And in spite of its marginal position in the context of the French left and the personal animosity between Rocard and Mitterrand, some elements of the second left agenda were taken on board by the socialists after their electoral success in 1981. The revision of labor legislation (Auroux laws) and the political-­administrative decentralization enacted by the Defferre laws were the greatest examples of the reception of second left ideas by the mainstream left. This occurred also because the expansionist economic policy first pursued by the Mitterrand government could not withstand the mounting pressures on the franc and had to be reversed. As of 1983, the U-­turn in economic policy—le tournant de la rigueur—led to a redefinition of goals, priorities, and narratives by the socialists in power, with policies of hitherto secondary importance moving to the fore. As Jonah Levy (1999, 78–88) points out, the lip service later paid to political-­administrative reorganization as “the great reform of Mitterrand’s first term” was supposed to make the public forget that he had been elected, not on a promise of decentralization, but on a pledge to break with capitalism. The fact remains that the decentralization reforms of 1982–83 were the first significant challenge to the Napoleonic model in France. The reforms were promoted in eminently political terms. Their purpose was to strengthen democracy at the local and regional levels by removing obstacles to the autonomy of elected bodies and by breaking the informal rule of the local notables (Loughlin 2001, 201–2). In formal terms, the changes were noteworthy. Regions with democratically elected bodies emerged alongside the municipalities and departments. The administrative tutelage of the prefects over subnational authorities was abolished, and the prefects’ executive powers were transferred to the presidents of the regional and departmental councils. For the first time, France had a regional tier of democratic government. However, the possibility of

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accumulating offices at various levels, upon which the informal power of the local notables rested, remained intact. In Italy, the Constitution of 1948, even if mainly focused on building a unitary welfare-­capitalist state, included special statutes for the islands of Sicily and Sardinia and for the bilingual regions near the northern borders. These could have been the first seeds for contesting the centralist solution, but postwar political conditions proved to be quite unfavorable to decentralization. Catholic civil society may very well have cherished ideas of subsidiarity in accordance with the social doctrine of the church, but the ruling Christian Democrats discarded decentralization and devolution. Fearing the creation of communist strongholds in the regions where the Italian Communist Party (PCI) had greater electoral weight, they rejected regionalization. Conversely, the communists, excluded from government at the national level, began to advocate the creation of autonomous regional governments, where they could demonstrate their executive skills and nourish national political ambitions (Bull 1987). Decentralization fell victim to these deadlocks of national politics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, so-­called ordinary regions—whose powers fell short of those deemed of “special status”—were established. The political force behind this change was the coalition government between the Christian Democrats and the moderate socialists (Italian Socialist Party [PSI]). A comparison with the French decentralization ten years later is instructive to underscore the limits of the Italian experience. In France, as we have seen, the path from the margins to the mainstream was open on the left, thus allowing the ideas of self-­organization and autonomy cherished by the second left to play a prominent role after Mitterrand won the presidential election. In Italy, on the contrary, the flux of marginal ideas to the political mainstream encountered serious obstacles. On the left, seclusion and radicalization at the margins increased the distance to the mainstream. The move of the Italian new left protest movement to clandestine armed struggle in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Zwerman, Steinhoff, and della Porta 2000, 92–93) hindered the absorption of their autonomist ideas by the more moderate left. The ideational horizon of Italian socialists, when it came to regionalization, did not stretch beyond technocratic-­administrative imperatives. On the center-­ right, in turn, notions of subsidiarity were strong in certain Catholic political milieus but not strong enough to alter the Christian Democrats’

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preference for a centralized state. Regionalization in the 1970s, far from reinvigorating democracy, resulted in a mere regional duplication of the impasses of national party politics (Hine 1996; Mazzoleni 2009). In Spain, Portugal, and Greece, the subnational dimension of democracy was a major topic of their transitions from authoritarian rule in the 1970s. There was a widespread conviction that strict centralization along Napoleonic lines constituted an authoritarian legacy that the new democratic regimes had to challenge. Their respective answers to such a challenge, however, differed greatly. In Spain, the transition to democracy was also a transition toward federalism and the establishment of elected regional governments. The constitutional pact between the left and the right, product of an elite-­driven transition to democracy, established the regional level as the key instance of subnational democracy in Spain. The crucial moment in the break with the previous authoritarian model occurred when center-­right prime minister Adolfo Suárez, having won the first free elections, took the initiative of negotiating with Josep Tarradellas, the president-­in-­exile of the Catalan Generalitat, the provisional devolution of autonomy to Catalonia. This triggered similar agreements in a total of nineteen regions, which became “autonomous communities” according to the Constitution of 1978 (Aja 2001, 231–32). In Portugal, conversely, a social revolutionary transition instigated autonomous local arenas of mobilization and popular participation. The major driving force behind the revolutionary transition at the local level was the MDP/CDE (Portuguese Democratic Movement / Democratic Electoral Commission). This was a front-­type organization, which included communists, socialists, social democrats, and progressive Catholics, based on the network of opposition forces that had run in the sham elections of the final years of the Estado Novo. After the April 1974 coup, using its network of local committees, the MDP/CDE took the initiative in replacing the municipal and civil parish executives that had been appointed by the previous regime. The movement also promoted grassroots civic mobilization and residents’ meetings and commissions, where the most pressing local issues—housing, primary health care, transportation, and so on—were collectively addressed (Cerezales 2003; Ramos Pinto 2013). This was, to be sure, a short-­lived experience—the MDP/CDE dissolved as a front-­type organization in late 1974, eventually becoming a satellite of the Communist Party—but

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it nevertheless left a participatory imprint on Portuguese local politics, which acquired a vitality it had never before experienced (Fernandes and Branco 2017). As regards the formal administrative structure of the state, the democratic regime established elected regional governments in the archipelagos of Madeira and Azores. In Greece, democratization of local authorities preceded that of the regional level of government, which would occur only in the 1990s. In neither instance, however, was the degree of subnational autonomy comparable to that of Portugal and Spain. As two specialists on the topic argue, the Greek transition to democracy, far from involving high levels of popular mobilization or carefully crafted interelite pacts, saw the return to power of the pre-­1967 liberal-­oligarchic political elite (Hlepas and Getimis 2011, 412). As a consequence, the informal and fragmentary localism that had characterized the Greek variant of the Napoleonic model was not seriously challenged during the transition to democracy in 1974. Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, different experiences of (re)democratization exerted decentralizing pressures on the Napoleonic state model in southern Europe. Each specific national context, as we have seen, presented different opportunities and challenges to the establishment of local and regional democratic institutions. However, even in the cases identified by the literature as more successful, many features of the Napoleonic legacy persisted. Indeed, the French specialized literature, in general, does not evaluate decentralization favorably. Quite to the contrary, many authors argue that the reforms, especially by not abolishing the possibility of accumulating offices at various levels, did not break the power of local notables and their informal networks and connections (Rondin 1985). As Albert Mabileau (1997) remarks, far from leading to a much-­ desired renewal of local democracy, decentralization resulted in a mere reorganization of the hierarchy of notables. Another body of research, though recognizing the political merits of decentralization, points out that it was not accompanied by the economic and fiscal measures necessary for the affirmation of subnational authorities and the activation of civil society (Levy 1999, 166–68). Still, comparatively within the southern European context, the French experience was quite advanced. In Spain, the large scope of the changes introduced by the new democratic constitution cannot be denied. John Loughlin, Frank Hendriks, and Anders Lidström (2011, 11) even suggest that Spain has thus

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departed from the Napoleonic model and moved closer to a federalist paradigm. One must note, however, that devolution of powers to the autonomous communities created, paradoxically, new foci of centralism. In certain respects, regional governments mimicked the administrative structure and behavioral patterns of a very centralized state. Administration was concentrated in the regional capitals, and the new regional authorities were generally averse to transferring skills and resources further down to local authorities (Colino and del Pino 2011, 359). In Portugal, of the four levels of subnational government envisaged in the Constitution of 1976, only civil parishes (freguesias) and municipalities (concelhos) became instances of local democracy. Grassroots residents’ commissions acquired advisory capacity, consequential for the defense of popular interests at the local level in some municipalities (Fernandes 2015). On the intermediate level, the statutes of autonomy for the islands of Madeira and Azores were an unprecedented novelty, although the further creation of administrative regions with elected bodies in continental Portugal was postponed and made dependent on a national referendum that would take place only in a very different political context.5 Finally, in southern Europe, the transitions to democracy of the 1970s were inextricably associated with the expectation of achieving higher standards of material well-­being, similar to those of the more advanced western European countries. A consensus on joining the supranational project of the European Communities quickly emerged in Greece, Portugal, and Spain, paving the way for relatively smooth processes of integration. Thus these countries joined France and Italy in the same supranational framework, something that became a determinant factor of subsequent institutional reform at the level of subnational government. BRE AK ING AWAY F R OM T HE NAP OL E ONIC MODEL , PAR T II: SUBNAT IONAL DEMO CR AC Y IN T HE C ONT E X T OF EUR OPE AN INT E G R AT ION, NE OL IBER AL ISM, AND AUS T ERIT Y, 19 9 1–2014

Italy constitutes a pivotal case between the two main periods of institutional change at the subnational level of government singled out in this chapter. As we noted above, in Italy, decentralization during the 1970s was substantially halted by the impasses of the postwar party system. However,

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the territorial issue reemerged in Italian politics when the postwar ideological cleavage collapsed. The fall of the Berlin Wall, which deprived the Communist Party of its external source of legitimacy, and the gradual erosion of the Catholic political subculture, upon which the predominance of the Christian Democrats had rested, made way for the emergence of regionalist movements in northern Italy (Cento Bull and Gilbert 2001). In the first half of the 1990s, the party system underwent profound changes and there was a very substantial renewal of the political elite. This process was triggered by the numerous corruption scandals that hit the main political parties. A movement for electoral reform gained momentum and managed, through two successive referenda (in 1991 and 1993), to introduce profound changes to electoral laws, which affected both national and subnational institutions. The main thrust of the reform was to reduce the proportionality and accentuate the competitiveness of the political system (D’Alimonte and Bartolini 1997, 110; Pasquino 1997, 44). As regards subnational institutions, the direct election of the heads of municipal executives, introduced in 1993, was particularly consequential, resulting in a significant renewal of the local political class and in more autonomy from national party structures (Dente 1997, 184). On the other hand, and at approximately the same time, a different range of concerns, of a fiscal and budgetary nature, started to weigh on the reform of regional and local governments. Thus the principle of fiscal federalism (the transfer of responsibility for controlling expenditures and collecting taxes to subnational authorities) was gradually implemented in Italy in an attempt to ensure sound public finances. To be sure, these concerns led in some instances to less opacity and a more efficient state apparatus. But the goal of strengthening subnational democracy faded away (Baldi 2000, 122). These new imperatives of budgetary stability, and their hold on administrative reform since the early 1990s, emerged from the crisis of western European welfare capitalism. While the first signs of such crisis appeared in the 1970s, they were not the driving force behind the push for decentralization. It was the triumph of neoliberalism and new public management in the 1980s that changed the dynamics of decentralization and devolution. In southern Europe, the main aim was now to rationalize weighty and costly administrative structures that had been scarcely altered since the nineteenth century. The Napoleonic model, which, in its

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heyday had been hailed as a major achievement of modernity, was now deemed outdated. Some authors had already interpreted French decentralization in the early 1980s as part of a European-­wide trend toward state retrenchment (Loughlin and Seiler 2001, 188–89; Wright 1994). Indeed, if the declared purpose of decentralization had been essentially political, aimed at deepening French democracy, the process could also be interpreted and justified from the point of view of institutional efficiency and performance. As Levy (1999, 78–79) pointed out, one could trace an evolution from the “associational socialism” of the second left to a kind of “associational liberalism” that, far from breaking with capitalism, aimed to ameliorate its economic and social performance. From this perspective, the shortcomings of French decentralization emerged more forcefully: subnational instances multiplied without a clear definition of their hierarchy and spheres of competences; the devolution of tasks to regional and local authorities was not accompanied by a transfer of resources or by fiscal autonomy; and fragmentation, blame-­shifting, and fierce competition among the various subnational authorities became the rule (Levy 1999, 134ff.). During the first decade after the reform, ever-­growing debt was a major issue for subnational governments, and renewed legislative action was required to ensure the financial autonomy of subnational authorities (Cole 2011, 322–24). In the face of these problems, some observers argued that the control of public expenditure required a tight monitoring of local and regional finances by the central government (Richard 2006). This shift in the focus of decentralization was very clear in the southern European countries that had to resort to external financial assistance in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. In Portugal, a referendum on the establishment of the administrative regions envisioned in the Constitution of 1976 eventually took place in 1998. The turnout was below 50 percent (a nonbinding result), and regionali­ zation was defeated by a large margin (see Santana Pereira and Tibúrcio, chapter 3). Concerns about inefficiency and fragmentation associated with the creation of a new tier of subnational government outweighed the prospect of democratizing regional government. Since then, regional economic policy and the management of European structural funds have been placed in the hands of nonelected technocratic bodies, while

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anachronistic remnants of the Napoleonic model, such as the prefectural civil governments, have been extinguished (Magone 2011, 389–90). In 2011, during the financial bailout, the “Memorandum of Understanding on Economic Policy Conditionality,” signed by the Portuguese government and the so-­called Troika of funders (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), established a commitment to “significantly reduce the number” of local government bodies (Government of Portugal 2011, 16). This resulted in the extinction or amalgamation of more than one thousand civil parishes (Gato 2015). Administrative rationalization remained on top of the political agenda, but strengthening of subnational democracy seems to have lost momentum in Portugal. On the other hand, the political competences of local and regional elected bodies acquired during the transition to democracy have not been reversed. In Greece, the changes triggered by similar external pressures on local and regional authorities were quite broad. During the 1980s, the reformist impetus of socialist governments (Pan-­Hellenic Socialist Movement, PASOK) was not very consequential. Thirteen regions with nonelected bodies were created to respond to the requirements of the European structural funds policy, but voluntary mergers of municipalities, encouraged by the central government, yielded scant results (Hlepas and Getimis 2011, 423). Following the return of PASOK to power in 1993, the nineteenth-­century prefectures (nomarchia) were transformed into democratically elected intermediate-­level bodies. In practice, however, the scope of the reform was limited because many competences that had previously been in the hands of the prefects were transferred to the parallel regional structure and managed by centrally appointed bureaucrats. The Kapodistrias Plan (1998) for the merger of municipalities, in turn, constituted a unique “example of a radical reform through [forced] amalgamations in Southern Europe” (Hlepas and Getimis 2011, 426). Of the 5,825 existing municipalities in 1996, only 1,033 remained in 1999, and these were further reduced to 325 by the implementation of the Kallikratis Plan in 2010–11. In addition to this policy of coercive mergers, the Kallikratis Plan transformed the thirteen administrative regions created in 1993 into entities with democratically elected bodies. The Papandreou government thus made use of a unique window of opportunity, the onset of the financial crisis and the pressure from international creditors, to overcome

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deeply entrenched resistances to territorial reform (Bertrana and Heinelt 2013, 83–84). But in terms of its overall rationale, the Kallikratis Plan was essentially a plan for state retrenchment (Akrivopoulou, Dimitropoulos, and Koutnatzis 2012, 664), aimed at reducing by half the number of government officials (from fifty thousand to twenty-­five thousand) and at cutting 1.5 billion euros in local government expenditures (Vammalle, Allain-­Dupré, and Gaillard 2012, 33). In Spain, the debate over the abolition of the nineteenth-­century provinces (Cosculluela Montaner 2011) continued up to the present day. With a partial and somewhat vague existence since 1978, on a supramunicipal but infraregional level, and lacking democratic legitimacy, the so-­ called diputaciones provinciales, historically seen by Catalans and Basques as “the quintessence of centralization” (Vicens Vives quoted by Sánchez Morón 2016), seem to be in their death throes. This anachronistic resi­ due of the Napoleonic tradition, which favored the most obscure political clientelism, has been heavily criticized for its nefarious effect on public finances (Lema, del Barrio, and Sánchez 2016; Sánchez Morón 2016). However, the definitive abolition of the provinces requires a constitutional reform for which political conditions have been lacking. Particularly since the financial crisis of 2008, decentralization in southern Europe must be viewed through the prism of austerity and its policies of state retrenchment. The old legacy of centralization remained an object of reform, but the political imperatives of stimulating participation and democratic citizenship were largely replaced by the managerial imperatives of efficiency, performance, and flexibility. Southern European countries shared a common legacy of political centralization. The Napoleonic model, adopted during the nineteenth century, persisted until the second half of the twentieth century, when it first began to show signs of archaism and exhaustion. In this chapter, we have identified two contexts when its assumptions were called into question, each driven by a specific logic. In the first period, experiences of (re)democratization challenged the authoritarian imprint of the model and sought to endow southern European democracies with a more participatory subnational dimension. In the second period, in contrast, it was the lack of efficiency and the structural burden placed on public finances that prompted reform initiatives.

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Our analysis suggests that the first context was more favorable to the establishment of autonomous local and/or regional democratic institutions. The countries where more substantial changes to their subnational political structures occurred in the context of (re)democratization, between the late 1960s and the early 1980s (France, Portugal, and Spain), showed a higher degree of autonomy and consolidation of their local and/or regional democratic institutions than those where more wide-­ranging reforms were enacted later (Greece and Italy). The reasons for the more robust forms of subnational democracy in the first group of countries vary from case to case. In the French case, we have underlined the process whereby leftist ideas of autonomy and self-­organization developed at the margins of the ideological spectrum were absorbed and reinterpreted by the political mainstream, coming to fruition when political projects of a centralistic nature—extensive nationalizations and central economic planning—faced unsurmountable impasses. In the Portuguese case, the participatory elements of the revolutionary transition created a relatively open local democracy in one of the more centralized countries of Europe. In Spain, inclusive inter­ elite pacts produced a constitutional arrangement where democratically elected regional governments have acquired a some degree of autonomy. These successes notwithstanding, the achievements of the countries in the first group are still subject to debate and criticism. The literature on France points to the problems of fragmentation, diffusion of responsibilities, fiscal impotence, and the still-­decisive role played by notables who accumulate offices at various levels and act as brokers between Paris and the peripheries. Portugal has failed to establish a countrywide regional democracy, leaving strategic regional planning in the hands of centrally appointed bureaucrats. In Spain, the preponderance of the regional level seems to have created subnational foci of centralism, which resist devolution further down the ladder. In the transition to the twenty-­first century, the wind started blowing from a different direction. Imperatives of efficiency and administrative rationalization have come to dominate the discourse on, and practice of, decentralization. The southern European countries where significant changes to their subnational institutions took place in this new context appear to have less consolidated and less autonomous local and regional democratic institutions. In Greece, the context of externally imposed

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austerity allowed the central government to pursue radical measures of territorial and administrative rationalization. But whether these will lead to a strengthening of subnational democracy remains to be seen. In Italy, the window of opportunity for the renewal of subnational democracy presented by the collapse of the postwar party system seems to be closing. Democratization at the local and regional levels has remained a challenge for southern European states. The Catalan crisis in 2017–18 dramatically reminded us of this. The important steps toward devolution taken in the context of (re)democratization must be emphasized, but they have not exhausted the potential of subnational democratic institutions. In a context where national governments appear, in the eyes of many citizens, increasingly incapable of fulfilling substantial demands, and where supranational European institutions still resist profound democratic reform, the subnational arena should again be viewed as an essential instrument to reinvigorate democracy.

NOT E S 1.  Even so, Greece and Italy rank in the upper half of the scale, indicating not so much that elected governments are subordinate or strictly dependent from non-­elected bodies at local level, but rather that it is only under certain circumstances or in specific areas of local public policy that the latter significantly interfere in their decision-­making autonomy. 2.  Loughlin and Peters also consider a fourth type, the Scandinavian tradition. This is a hybrid subtype that combines features from the three main state traditions: strong local government (Anglo-­Saxon), corporatist intermediation (German), and central control and standardization (French). 3.  At the National Convention of 1792, Saint-­Just, sitting with the Jacobins, proposed a division of the territory into departments of exactly the same size, demarcated by meridians and parallels. The deputies, however, opted instead for a geographical and not a purely geometric criterion: the perimeter of each department would be determined by the distance one could travel on horseback in a day to reach its main city (Loughlin and Seiler 2001, 187, 196). 4.  For a magnificent illustration of this flow of marginal ideas to the dominant culture, see Theodore Roszak’s (1986) essay on the influence of Cali­ fornian counterculture on the global technological revolution.

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5.  Moreover, the prohibition of political parties of a “regional nature or scope” (Article 51-­4 of the Constitution) indicates a clear distrust of regional democracy by the regime founders.

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Hine, David. 1996. “Federalism, Regionalism, and the Unitary State: Contemporary Regional Pressures in Historical Perspective.” In Italian Regionalism: History, Identity and Politics, edited by C. Levy, 109–31. Washington, DC: Berg. Hlepas, Nikolaos-­Kmoninos. 2012. “Local Government in Greece.” In Local Government in the Member States of the European Union: A Comparative Legal Perspective, edited by A.-­M. Moreno, 257–81. Madrid: Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública. Hlepas, Nikolaos-­Kmoninos, and Panos Getimis. 2011. “Greece: A Case of Fragmented Centralism and ‘Behind the Scenes’ Localism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe, edited by John Loughlin, Frank Hendriks, and Ander Lidström, 410–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Inglehart, Ronald. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lema, David, Ana del Barrio, and Juan C. Sánchez. 2016. “Cuánto cuestan las diputaciones provinciales?” El Mundo, February 25. Levy, Jonah D. 1999. Tocqueville’s Revenge: State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lijphart, Arend. 1999. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-­Six Countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Loughlin, John. 2001. “Greece: Between ‘Henosis’ and Decentralization.” In Subnational Democracy in the European Union: Challenges and Opportunities, edited by John Loughlin, 271–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loughlin, John, Frank Hendriks, and Anders Lidström. 2011. “Introduction—Subnational Democracy in Europe: Changing Backgrounds and The­oretical Models.” In The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe, edited by John Loughlin, Frank Hendriks, and Anders Lidström, 1–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loughlin, John, and B. Guy Peters. 1997. “State Traditions, Administrative Reform and Regionalization.” In The Political Economy of Regionalism, edited by Michael Keating and John Loughlin, 41–62. London: Routledge. Loughlin, John, and Daniel-­L. Seiler. 2001. “France: Between Centralization and Fragmentation.” In Subnational Democracy in the European Union: Challenges and Opportunities, edited by John Loughlin, 185–210. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mabileau, Albert. 1997. “Les génies invisibles du local: Faux-­semblants et dynamiques de la décentralisation.” Revue Française de Science Politique 47 (3/4): 340–76.

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Magone, José M. 2011. “Portugal: Local Democracy in a Small Centralized Republic.” In The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe, edited by John Loughlin, Frank Hendriks, and Anders Lidström, 384–409. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mazzoleni, Martino. 2009. “The Italian Regionalization: A Story of Partisan Logics.” Modern Italy 14 (2): 135–50. Mouzelis, Nicos. 1983. “On the Demise of Oligarchic Parliamentarism in the Semi-­periphery: A Balkan-­Latin American Comparison.” Sociology 13 (1): 28–43. Oliveira, César. 1996a. “O Estado Novo e os municípios corporativos.” In História dos municípios e do poder local, edited by César Oliveira, 285–325. Lisbon: Temas e Debates. ———. 1996b. “A República e os municípios.” In História dos municípios e do poder local, edited by César Oliveira, 243–83. Lisbon: Temas e Debates. Page, Edward C. 1991. Localism and Centralism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pasquino, Gianfranco. 1997. “No Longer a ‘Party State’? Institutions, Power and the Problems of Italian Reform.” West European Politics 20 (1): 34–53. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piattoni, Simona, and Marco Brunazzo. 2011. “Italy: The Subnational Dimension to Strengthening Democracy since the 1990s.” In The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe, edited by John Loughlin, Frank Hendriks, and Anders Lidström, 331–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Putnam, Robert D. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ramos Pinto, Pedro. 2013. Lisbon Rising: Urban Social Movements in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974–75. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Richard, Pierre. 2006. Solidarité et performance: Les enjeux de la maîtrise des dépenses publiques locales. Paris: Documentation Française. Rondin, Jacques. 1985. Le sacre des notables: La France en décentralisation. Paris: Fayard. Roszak, Theodore. 1986. From Satori to Silicon Valley. San Francisco: Don’t Call It Frisco Press. Sánchez Morón, Miguel. 2016. “Un residuo del siglo XIX.” El País, March 7. Sanz Hoya, Julián. 2008. La construcción de la dictadura franquista en Cantabria. Santander: Ediciones de la Universidad de Cantabria. Skinner, Quentin. 1989. “The State.” In Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, edited by T. Ball, J. Farr, and R. L. Hanson, 90–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Tavares de Almeida, Pedro. 1991. Eleições e caciquismo no Portugal Oitocentista (1868–1890). Lisbon: Difel. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1856. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Translated by John Bonner. New York: Harper and Brothers. Vammalle, Camila, Dorothée Allain-­D upré, and Norbert Gaillard. 2012. “A Sub-­central Government Perspective on Fiscal Policy in a Tight Fiscal Environment.” In Institutional and Financial Relations across Levels of Government, edited by Junhung Kim and Camila Vammalle, 17–43. Paris: OECD. Weber, Max. 1946. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, Vincent. 1994. Privatization in Western Europe: Pressures, Problems and Paradoxes. London: Pinter. Ziblatt, Daniel. 2006. Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zwerman, Gilda, Patricia Steinhoff, and Donatella della Porta. 2000. “Disappearing Social Movements: Clandestinity in the Cycle of New Left Protest in the US, Japan, Germany, and Italy.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 5 (1): 85–104.

SIX

Women’s Political Representation Edna Costa

During the past decades, both the academic community and the wider public have seen a multiplication of debates and studies on the role of women in the political sphere, analyzing its causes and proposing ways to overcome their chronic minority status and underrepresentation in political decision-­making bodies. Across the globe, gender inequality has declined significantly in recent decades, especially in education levels and participation in the labor market. But differences between men and women are still particularly sharp in the political arena. And although women have acquired the right to vote virtually everywhere in the world, only a very limited number of countries have achieved gender parity in national parliaments and executives. Though traditionally formulated within the context of feminist gender and politics studies, these dynamics lead to a wider discussion about the quality and levels of democratic representation (see Branco, chapter 7; Cancela, chapter 1; Sanches, chapter 2). In this chapter, we aim to contribute to an assessment of the quality of southern European 217

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democracies from the perspective of women’s political representation. The relation between women and political power has indeed played a central role in the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-­Dem), which developed a three-­dimensional index of women’s political empowerment, thus allowing the assessment of their progress in the acquisition of civil liberties and levels of participation in civil society and in elections (Sundström et al. 2017). V-­Dem data also allows for a longitudinal comparative analysis. In this chapter, we will focus on female political participation by analyzing their effective presence in decision-­making bodies. Thus our main questions are the following: (1) What are the trajectories of women’s political representation (WPR) in South European parliaments and executives between 1968 and today? (2) Which actors and political processes explain the different patterns of WPR? The South European countries are ideal objects of comparison since they share a set of historical sociocultural and political legacies strongly unfavorable to the expansion of WPR. Among these are the legacy of authoritarian regimes and highly conservative governance, which were in place for most of the twentieth century, and the cultural and institutional weight of organized religion (Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox Church). Historically, both have led to the social and political subordination of women, their withdrawal from public life, and the marginalization and even the repression of women’s movements (Gunther, Diamandouros, and Sōtēropoulos 2006). Despite this adverse weight of history, all five countries show a positive evolution in women’s political empowerment during the last five decades (Sundström et al. 2017). With regard to women’s descriptive representation, some of these countries reached the twenty-­first century with near-­parity parliaments and cabinets, while others retained persistently low levels of feminization of political offices. Comparative longitudinal studies on WPR in southern Europe are scarce, especially when taking into account both the legislative and the executive levels. Our aim is to fill this gap, in dialogue with single-­case and comparative studies that, though more limited in time, space, or object, are essential for the analysis and understanding of the global and national trajectories of WPR in southern Europe. This chapter is structured in three main parts. First, a theoretical framework clarifies the concept of WPR, its origin, and multiple

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interpretations, discussing also the several explanatory models of gender inequality in political representation and concluding with a reflection on the impact of different institutional frameworks. The second part deals with an empirical analysis of WPR. The analysis builds on data collected by V-­Dem, the proportion of women elected to national parliaments and appointed to cabinet positions (Coppedge et al. 2016). Next, we try to understand the role of the institutional context in the genesis of patterns of WPR, focusing on electoral systems and gender quotas (International IDEA n.d.). After that, we look at the impact of political parties and party competition, exploring the influence of particular aspects like recruitment practices, ideology, levels of electoral competition, women’s party sections, and the receptiveness to gender equality policies and ideas flowing from international organizations. Finally, we develop our own explanation of the similarities and differences in WPR found across southern Europe, concluding with a reflection on future research agendas. WHAT IS WOMEN ’S P OL IT IC AL REPRE SENTAT ION?

Women’s right to an active voice in the political sphere and to the political representation of their interests is not a recent demand, having mobilized groups and movements since the end of the nineteenth century. Over time, both the issues and the arguments of the struggle for women’s rights have changed significantly, as has the meaning of women as political individuals (Freidenvall and Sawer 2013; Beckwith 2014, 27). If the nineteenth century saw universal suffrage as women’s main political demand, the end of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the topic of WPR. The suffrage movement, united by the purpose of women’s right to vote, had developed in connection with maternal feminism, which accepted traditional gender roles and therefore limited its political action to the areas closest to women’s experience as mothers and homemakers. From the 1960s and 1970s onward, the rejection of the maternalistic discourse by a second wave of feminism resulted in a new conception of women based on the idea of justice, according to which their representation in political office should mirror their presence in the electorate. At the same time, some groups of women parliamentarians

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have justified the legitimacy of their work solely on their individual abili­ ties, staying away from the gender equality debate.1 In recent decades, the concept of parity democracy, promoted since the late 1980s by the Council of Europe, became central to gender equality politics. At the heart of the concept of parity is the recognition of the duality of the human race, which gives equal value and dignity to both women and men, something that necessarily implies a redefinition of gender roles in all domains, including public life and policy. This made possible a turn toward a politics of presence, which considered representation to be effective only if the electors are represented by those whose condition resembles their own, that is, only if political decision-­makers reflect the various groups that make up society (Phillips 1995, 66). It is now generally accepted that the quality of democracy is impoverished when any major societal group lacks significant political-­ institutional representation. Most international organizations have recently considered underrepresentation as a democratic deficit.2 Actions taken by the UN and the EU have been especially important, fostering the adoption of legal instruments such as gender quotas and setting gender equality targets and objectives for their member states.3 Indeed, in recent decades both feminist movements and international organizations have favored fast-­track strategies that pressure states to adopt various mechanisms of political inclusion. In contrast to the incremental track, which promotes formal equality through the principle of equal opportunities, the former favors substantive equality and is more common in recent democracies and postconflict countries (Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013). There is far from a consensus on the concept of WPR and the relevance of each of its dimensions in feminist political theory (Pitkin 1967). The question is whether an increase in the number of women in political representative bodies (descriptive representation) leads to increasing attention to the interests and demands of women as a social category (substantive representation) (Escobar-­L emmon and Taylor-­Robinson 2014; Htun 2015; Beckwith 2014). A stronger case for WPR argues that effective representation of a group requires some degree of shared attributes. In other words, ultimately, only a woman will meet the needs of other women. Indeed, the arguments for descriptive representation are predominant in political debates, defended by authors who believe that

Women’s Political Representation  221

the effective political empowerment of women “requires a descriptive presence in formal political positions and that women de facto [should] have an equal share of the distribution of power” (Sundström et al. 2017, 8). Empirical research has also emphasized the importance of including women in the various institutions of the state, particularly at the parliamentary level and, more recently, also in the executive. Others have counterargued by saying that women are a heterogeneous group, with many and varying preferences and interests, and emphasizing instead other loci and forms of political representation (Celis et al. 2008). However, all feminist literature agrees on the need of some degree of descriptive political representation in order for women’s interests to make their way politically in relevant and significant forms. T HE C AUSE S OF G ENDER INE Q UAL IT Y IN P OL IT IC AL REPRE SENTAT ION

The literature largely agrees on the lack of mono-­causal explanations for the phenomenon of gender inequality in political representation, as it has shown the impact of cultural, socioeconomic, and political factors in the process of political recruitment (Lovenduski and Norris 1993; Norris and Lovenduski 1995; Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013, 4–5).4 Thus, on the supply side of the political market, the persistence of stereotypes about traditional gender roles, together with a patriarchal value system, perpetuated cultural norms that induced in women a persistent feeling of inferiority and a sense of inadequacy that made them reluctant to enter the political arena (Inglehart and Norris 2003; Lawless and Fox 2005). Catholic religion has also greatly reinforced these cultural patterns (Reynolds 1999). Besides cultural factors, women’s ability to gain political power depended directly on their progress outside this domain. Here women’s individual resources, like educational level and professional experience, have been determining factors. In fact, the workplace is essential in securing financial resources, strategic contacts, and an organizational basis for political activity. In a hypothetical setting of a female population with high levels of education and professional activity, the number of candidates for political office would naturally increase, made possible by stronger individual motivation, better training, and

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better access to the wider power networks deemed necessary to run for office (Inglehart and Norris 2003). It is also worth stressing that the presence of women in top political office can be mutually reinforcing. For instance, the growing presence of women in national parliaments can boost their selection for cabinet positions (Escobar-­Lemmon and Taylor-­Robinson 2005; Krook and O’Brien 2012; Claveria 2014). When we turn to political demand, we find other sets of factors that play an important role in the WPR literature. The earlier women conquered the right to vote and to be elected, the greater the likelihood of women being politically active. Additionally, the size and cohesion of feminist movements should be considered as causal factors. Through civic mobilization and electoral campaigning, these movements can change the political culture as regards women’s electability (Christmas-­ Best and Kjaer 2007). Although comparative studies have attested to the importance of each of these factors, recent works have demonstrated the weak causal impact in explaining current patterns of WPR of sociocultural variables and of timing of suffrage extension ( Jalalzai and Krook 2010). The role of institutions, social movements and parties, and the political process in general in the recruitment of women to decision-­making bodies has gained prominence in the literature. This is the group of factors on which we will focus, looking in particular at the specific features of the electoral and party systems and at the role of inclusion mechanisms such as gender quotas. Several features of electoral systems may affect the chances of women’s election to parliament. The systems’ levels of plasticity make them prime grounds for addressing this issue. The principles of representation that define the main types of electoral systems are sharply contrasting. As regards the way to convert votes into mandates, in a majoritarian system the candidate who receives the majority of votes in the district wins the mandate, with the defeated having no mandates. In a proportional representation (PR) system, mandates are apportioned according to the percentage of votes received by candidates. Thus we usually find majoritarian formulas applied in districts that elect a single candidate (uninominal) and proportional ones in those that elect several candidates (plurinominal) (Nohlen 2007). For our purposes, while majori­ tarian systems favor the formation of single-­party majorities, PR systems

Women’s Political Representation  223

seek to represent the electorate in a more balanced manner, mirroring the particular weight each social and political group has in society. Another issue to consider is the type of electoral list used in PR systems, which can be open or closed. This may also directly influence the opportunities created by the electoral system for the election of underrepresented groups, such as women. According to a wide range of studies, PR electoral systems with closed lists (and large-­magnitude districts) are most favorable for the election of female candidates (Caul 1999; Reynolds 1999; Matland 2005; Paxton, Hughes, and Painter 2010; McAllister and Studlar 2002). This combination of both proportionality and availability of a high number of electoral seats allows for a greater balance in the electoral lists submitted by parties and for the inclusion of women candidates in eligible positions. This would not be as likely in more competitive systems. Often the question is whether it will be easier to persuade voters to vote for women or for party leaders to put women in eligible positions. For Pippa Norris (2006, 206), “The key challenge facing women and minorities is not just becoming nominated per se, but contesting a winnable seat in single-­member districts, or being ranked near the top of the party list of candidates in PR systems.” In fact, balanced representation in lists may be a way to attract voters, by including candidates who appeal to specific subgroups of voters. Thus a female candidate can be seen as an advantage. Subsequently, this may generate a diffusion process, as rival parties proceed to appoint women to leadership positions once they perceive it is an electoral winning strategy. Gender inequality in WPR is part of the broader issue of women’s status within the different spheres of social life, whether economic, family, or cultural. There are currently compensatory strategies that merit analysis, especially at the policy level. Since discrimination and exclusion are identified as the main source of the problem, affirmative action is seen as the transitional but necessary means to ensure de facto equality, as a compensation for the structural barriers that women face in political life. This would include positions reserved just for women or representation quotas in political parties and governing institutions (either informally established or legally imposed).5 We will focus on representation quotas, which are currently in place in most Western democracies. Electoral quotas are usually introduced by legislative means, through amendments to the constitution or to the electoral law, and

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are therefore applicable to all political parties. They are the strictest of these mechanisms, introducing a formal selection criterion and establishing minimum limits of representation of women in the candidate lists. Electoral quotas can be applied not only in parliament but also in advisory committees, the public administration, and even the private economy (Lépinard and Rubio-­Marín 2018b). Since the 1970s, quotas have been introduced in many countries by political parties, enshrined in their statutes and internal regulations, with the goal of integrating a minimum percentage of women into party organizations and electoral lists. This type of self-­regulation, for instance, was decisive in increasing WPR in countries such as Denmark and Norway in the early 1970s and in Sweden during the 1990s (Caul 1999). In addition, the successful implementation of a quota system fundamentally depends on two additional factors: the ordering of candidates in electoral lists and the existence of penalties for noncompliance. Indeed, one of the main arguments of its advocates is the possibility of imposing sanctions, whether pecuniary or through the rejection of lists. Electoral quotas do possess a mandatory nature that makes them more attractive in the eyes of their proponents. Yet whatever the penalty, the rules concerning the rank order on the candidate lists are always crucial. A quota system that ignores this factor may easily become merely symbolic. If, for example, a PR system requires 40 percent of candidates on lists to be women but makes no mention of their rank order, we can easily imagine male candidates securing all electable positions, thus nullifying the quotas. The most common sorting system today is the zipper system, which requires male and female candidates to alternate in a certain proportion. If, as we have seen, quotas compensate for the barriers that keep women away from political power, thus reversing historical patterns of exclusion, they can nevertheless coexist with practices that perpetuate the marginalization of women from the center of power (Htun 2015, 155). In fact, “Although the recent, global diffusion of candidate gender quotas reduces the extent to which sex poses an obstacle for women’s election, quotas alone do not transform the gender hierarchies that structure political careers and power networks” (Franceschet and Piscopo 2014, 86). The recruitment and selection process falls almost exclusively on political parties, which are the gatekeepers of political power. It is, therefore, through the party recruitment process that a country’s political elite

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is shaped, which is to say, elected politicians are mostly the result of a filtering process carried out by parties, and their profile will reflect the selection criteria employed at the time of their recruitment. As we shall see, recruitment processes are often influenced by antagonistic motivations, sometimes conditioned by the institutional environment, by party ideology, and by electoral competition and at other times influenced by pressure from international organizations and women’s movements. The mechanisms of selection by party entail the core formal dimensions of centralization and bureaucratization. This means that the extent to which selection is centralized in the leader/national leadership, and to which it reflects clearly stipulated formal requirements, shapes the degree of WPR. In general, a centralized and bureaucratic selection more easily ensures a balanced representation of various minority groups, such as women. Especially at the parliamentary level, national leaderships are often concerned with ensuring a balance in the final list of candidates that will please as many voters as possible, as well as reflect the influence of women’s organizations or sections within the party itself. As regards cabinet positions, a key factor is the executive leader’s level of autonomy, which can determine the level of WPR in the cabinet (Franceschet and Thomas 2015; Annesley 2015). Moreover, a bureaucratic process more easily allows the adoption of strategies and requirements favorable to the selection of women, thus counterbalancing tendencies for privileging the selection of male candidates. A system with these characteristics may even include rules, such as representation quotas, that guarantee, at the outset, the selection of women. However, it is necessary to consider the informal aspects that also influence recruitment, in particular the supply of candidates and the requirements of the recruiters. Informal rules are defined by Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky (2006, 5) quite broadly, as “socially shared rules, usually unwritten, which are created, communicated and enforced outside the officially sanctioned channels,” a definition congruent with the literature on women’s political recruitment, which has shown the existence of informal recruitment practices in political parties, usually unknown to the majority of the electorate and resulting in women’s powerlessness and even discrimination (Annesley 2015; Bjarnegård and Kenny 2015; Franceschet and Thomas 2015; Verge 2015). Although informal norms can reinforce formal procedures, they often work as a

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barrier to the translation of written rules into rules in use (Helmke and Levitsky 2006; Bjarnegård and Kenny 2015). This depends on the level of institutionalization and of correspondence between formal rules (e.g., laws) and the informal rules or practices. Along with the statutory rules set by each party, we must consider the motivations of the selectors, since they will establish the eligibility criteria of the candidates. Among these criteria, political experience, incumbency, service to the party, previously occupied political or professional positions, position within the different party-­political factions, and even capacity to fund-­raise are usually valued. The type of ministerial recruitment—generalist versus specialist—may have also considerable weight, since most women, even in Western democracies, have weaker political credentials than men, placing them at a disadvantage in generalist ministerial selections (Annesley 2015; Claveria 2014). To this set of criteria, Tània Verge (2015; Verge and Fuente 2014) adds the role of some routine practices within the parties themselves that tend to exclude women candidates, such as the value given to leadership styles based on political ambition, effectiveness, and even authoritarianism, the importance of informal networks, and the scheduling of party activities in ways incompatible with the family responsibilities that still fall mostly on women. These factors condition, from the outset, the very supply of women candidates (Verge 2015, 758). In addition to this set of formal and informal rules, one should note that from the 1980s onward, women’s vote has no longer been almost fully anchored to the right of the political spectrum, making the electoral bases of political parties more volatile. This favors WPR, as women become an electorate accessible for most political parties (Inglehart and Norris 2003). Currently the support and promotion of women candidates are spread out across the political spectrum, thanks also to the dynamics of competition for an electorate that has become more attuned to gender issues (Kittilson 2006, 24). In this sense, the success in capturing female support depends on the incorporation of issues such as the role of women in the public sphere, which has gained salience since the 1970s. We can still distinguish parties according to whether they integrate innovative issues and practices with internal factors like openness to civil society and political competition, or whether they accept change only as a consequence of a contagion effect (Matland and Studlar 1996;

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Kittilson 2006, 136). This dynamic will be further explored in the empirical analysis of this chapter. From the 1980s onward, the feminist movement started considering political institutions as an important channel for expressing their demands and a means to influence the political agenda from inside the system. At the same time, various international organizations, such as the UN, openly supported and encouraged these movements. In many countries, this joint effort led to the creation of state agencies for the promotion of gender equality, and although there is great variation in their nature and autonomy of action, they are now part of the institutional framework of most Western democracies (Lovenduski 2005). A gradual connection of women’s movements with political parties and the creation of women’s sections has resulted in changes in the dynamics of the parties themselves, having as a consequence a rise in demands for WPR (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003; Kittilson 2006). These organizations function as vehicles of women’s entry into the parties, serve as a network of connections for those beginning their party activity, and are an especially fertile ground for the emergence of highly experienced and capable leaderships and female candidacies. They frequently demand statutory representation in parties’ organs and have a say in the elaboration of candidate lists for internal and external elections. However, if they are not properly integrated into the party’s main structure, there is the risk of their gradual disengagement and their being assigned only to symbolic positions, without any relevant political role (Caul 1999; Ruiz Jiménez 2002). All the factors mentioned above interact with one another in the outcomes of recruitment processes. If institutional frameworks establish the initial legal setup, intraparty rules will define the bureaucratic pathway to the nomination of the candidate, while the motivations of the selectors will in turn determine which candidates are chosen. Thus, successfully navigating the recruitment process implies overcoming several barriers. In the empirical section below, we will explore, for each of the five South European countries, how their institutional framework conditioned the recruitment patterns of the major political parties and identify the main challenges they faced in recent decades. We will focus primarily on the role of party ideology, electoral competition, women’s organizations’ demands, and pressures from international organizations.

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This section begins by addressing our empirical outcomes, that is, levels and patterns of WPR in South European parliaments and executives. WOMEN ’S P OL IT IC AL REPRE SENTAT ION IN PARL IAMENT S AND E X E CU T I VE S IN SO U T HERN EUR OPE

Using V-­Dem data, we will next analyze the levels of female representation in parliamentary and governmental elites in France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. We will use as evaluation criteria the model developed by Drude Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar (2013, 226). According to their scale, a level of female representation under 10 percent is classified as male monopoly; below 25 percent means women are a small minority; a medium level of representation ranges from 25 percent to 40 percent and corresponds to a large minority; and a higher representation level corresponds to over 40 percent, which is considered parity level. Figure 6.1 shows the evolution of WPR in parliaments and executives for each country in the last five decades. As one can see, there are marked differences in patterns over time, as well as cross-­country variation, at both levels. Figure 6.2 examines two indicators, the rates of parliamentary and executive feminization.6 Although a large majority of comparative studies on WPR are limited to the parliamentary level, work on the feminization of ministerial elites has been expanding. The available data allows us to look at the two institutional realms. One of the challenges also facing WPR is related to the fact that parliamentary powers might be eroding, which has the consequence of a devaluation of WPR itself, after a dynamic of “women in, power out” (Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013, 305). In this sense, one should expect to see high female presence in parliaments and low female presence in executives. However, the data on southern Europe does not support a pattern of high parliamentary feminization versus low governmental feminization. Similar results were obtained by Silvia Claveria (2014), who showed great variation between twenty-­three industrialized democracies. In fact, as shown in figure 6.1, only in Italy does the presence of women in parliament consistently exceed that of women in government (except for the 2013 election). The trend is the opposite in France, where ministerial feminization far surpasses the parliamentary. The other three

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countries show somewhat more unclear patterns, with Portugal and Spain having a relative advantage of women in parliament and Greece of women in ministries. Likewise, taking a synchronic view of figure 6.2, we can conclude that, at the time of their last election, while Italy and Portugal presented medium levels of female representation in both arenas, Greece evinced low values in both parliament and government. France and Spain displayed the highest representation levels, although in the former we find parity at ministerial representation and in the latter a representation in parliament close to parity. Looking at the type of institution, and referring first to the government, the greatest contrast is found between the French parity and the absence of women ministers in Greece. As regards the parliament, Greece holds the last place as well, with Italy and Portugal at a medium level of representation and France and Spain with the highest scores, but led by the latter. In all countries women’s suffrage was achieved between the 1930s and 1950s, though in Portugal voting restrictions based on levels of education lingered until 1974. At this early stage of male monopoly, the proportion of women was extremely low, never reaching 10 percent. Barriers to women’s access to the public and political sphere were indeed very high in the postsuffrage decades, and even when female candidates were elected, their marginalization was frequent. By the end of the twentieth century, parliamentary WPR remained low in all five countries, particularly in Greece, still well within the male monopoly category, but also in Italy and France, countries that had barely crossed that 10 percent boundary. Conversely, in the last election of this period, Spain was very close to obtaining a quarter of female parliamentary representatives (22 percent), followed by Portugal (19 percent). At the ministerial level too, female representation was low in France and in Italy, and in Greece and Portugal male monopoly prevailed. However, Spain already had medium levels of representation (27 percent) by 1996. The first two decades of the twenty-­first century brought a sizable evolution in WPR in all five countries. Female representation in national parliaments increased fourfold. The most dramatic rise occurred in France, from 11 percent in 1997 to 39 percent in 2017. Similarly, Italy and Greece tripled the share of women in parliaments, but, in the Greek case this rise was still within the low-­representation category. In

230  Edna Costa France 60

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1973

1975

1976

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Parliament

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1995

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40

30

20

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1977

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1982

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Parliament

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2015

2016

2019

Executive

FIGURE 6.1.  Feminization rate of the executive and the parliament, 1968–2019. The arrowed vertical lines mark the range of a medium level of female representation (25 to 40 percent). Variables: Lower chamber female legislators (v2lgfemleg), Question: “What percentage (%) of the lower (or unicameral) chamber of the legislature is female?”; Election of women in the cabinet (v2elwomcab), Question: “In the first cabinet after this national election, what percentage (%) of the ministers was female?” Source: Author’s elaboration, based on Coppedge et al. (2016); International IDEA (n.d.).

232  Edna Costa

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