Political Parties, Cleavage Structures and Referendum Voting: Electoral Behaviour in the Portuguese Regionalization Referendum of 1998

Referenda voting in Portugal, 1998: The effects of party sympathies, social structure and pressure groups1

“…The Opposition was able to tap into a fairly strong conservative and populist anti‐politician mood in favour of fewer politicians, lower public spending and less corruption. To a certain extent, as we have argued elsewhere, the culture of ‘No’ is easier to promote in Portugal than a step into the new and the unknown (Baum & Freire 2001). In this respect, Portuguese voters are not atypical.…”

“…Our explanation for high abstention in the regionalisation referendum pointed to ‘party politics’ and the rather poor handling of the regionalisation campaign by the PS , in particular in the way that boundaries were drawn (see Baum & Freire 2001). We especially highlighted the strong internal party divisions between the current leaders of the PS and its founder, Mário Soares, whose prestige and influence with the electorate is still quite substantial.…”

“…On the other hand, in the regionalisation referendum, the effects of some of the social and demographic structures were contrary to those experienced in parliamentary elections 5 – that is, the counties with a younger age structure (Factor 3) and with a denser population of small and medium farmers (Factor 5) tended to vote in 1995 for the rightist parties. However, when we control for right‐wing vote we can see that these counties gave greater support for regionalisation, which was proposed by the parties of the Left (see Table 4; see also Table 5), although it was insufficient for the ‘Yes’ vote to win the northern regions (Baum & Freire 2001). This factor might be related to the location of a strong regionalist lobby in the north of the country.…”

“…Here we are specifically referring to the implication that 'separatist tensions' in the north of the country might explode if the regionalist cause lost in the referendum. 4 This analysis was supported by the fact that the PS was the party most heavily penalised by abstention (Baum & Freire 2001).…”

Impact of globalization on the direct participation of citizens in local self-government in the Republic of Bulgaria

“…The referendums are a preferred form because they enable citizens to shape the formation of laws more quickly than legislative procedures that mediate their legal preferences and policy outcomes [18]. Indeed, referendums transfer decisionmaking power to the people [19], although their representativeness is called into question [20].…”