Volume (4): Issue (2)

The main goal of this article is to analyse the role of social, political and ideological factors in explaining party system change in Portugal during the democratic period (April 1974June 2005). We begin with the evolving trends in the party system format, and their main effects on the patterns of parties’ interactions as well as on the functioning of the political system. This first approach will enable us to divide the democratic period into two distinct phases and an interlude. Following this, we will analyse the dimensions and strength of policy competition between the parties before, finally, analysing the impact of social, political and ideological factors on party system change in Portugal.

Recent studies conclude that human capital should be a high priority because it is a key growth input, particularly in an increasingly knowledge-based economy and an important lever of social cohesion policy. However, country-specific studies involving human capital and economic performance are scarce both for Portugal and for other countries. The small number of such studies is explained to a large extent by the increased complexity and difficulty of estimating continuous time series for human capital stock giving data paucity. This article tries to facilitate the emergence of further empirical works on the relation between human capital and long-term economic growth by providing an improved measure of the stock of human capital for the Portuguese economy from 1960 up to 2001.