De todas as instituições políticas, «o poder executivo do Governo é, de longe, o mais importante» (Lijphart, 2000: vii). A sua centralidade no processo de tomada de decisões das democracias avançadas tem, no entanto, sido amplamente questionada. [...]

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

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

At a time when party politics is becoming increasingly personalised, conventional wisdom argues that the party leaders’ power in organisations is on the rise. However, scholarship has not yet provided a thorough and systematic analysis of the role of party leaders that offers theoretical and empirical specification. The aim of this article is to provide an analytical framework for the study of party leadership by examining the concept of leadership autonomy and its components. This new conceptualisation is then applied to a number of different parties across Western Europe, showing how leadership autonomy varies across countries and different party organisations. The conclusion sets out the implications for party change and highlights the importance of placing the leaders’ role at the centre of the empirical analysis of political parties.

The use of electronic voting has been considered an important tool to improve electoral processes in some circumstances, with potential effects in party-voter linkages and participation. However, many countries are skeptical in adopting this digital tool and there are relevant shortcomings in the implementation of electronic voting. Despite favorable conditions for the innovation in voting mechanisms, Portugal is one of the countries still considering the possibility to introduce e-voting. This study argues that we need to consider not only the context in which e-voting takes place, but also the key role of party agents. Drawing on interviews with party officials and experts, primary data collection and media sources, this paper shows that in Portugal e-voting is not regarded as a potential tool to improve the electoral process due to the high level of trust and quality of traditional voting mechanisms, as well as due to the divergent interest of political parties. In addition, party organizations are not familiar with the use of digital tools in terms of grassroot mobilization. Overall, the findings indicate that party barriers are also key for allowing the (non)adoption of e-voting.

This article aims to examine how citizens evaluate the contribution of interest groups to the functioning of representative democracies, focusing on several dimensions related to political representation and democratic governance. Drawing on an original online survey conducted to a representative sample of the population in Portugal, we investigate the correlates of citizens’ perceptions regarding interest groups, in particular the impact of individual-level factors related to political involvement, partisanship, party closeness and ideology. We find that associational membership and partisan identities positively impact citizens’ views, while higher levels of (perceived) proximity between political parties and groups increasenegative perceptions. Moreover, people displaying greater trust in interest groups are more likely to hold positive views of organised interests. Overall, political features shape citizens’ attitudes towards groups to a great extent, as people anchored to the political system are more prone to support the institutional role of organised interests and to evaluate their contribution to the functioning of democracies more positively.