Serra-Silva, S., and Santos, N (2022) The 2021 Portuguese Presidential Election under extraordinary circumstances: COVID-19 and the rise of the radical right in Portugal. Mediterranean Politics, Online First. 

This article attempts to provide an overview of the main features of the presidential elections of 2021 in Portugal, namely the measures introduced to mitigate the threat of the pandemic and assure voters’ safety, the impact of the pandemic and the lockdown in the electoral campaign, the electoral results, and the rise of the radical right in Portugal and its implications.

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Serra-Silva, S., (2022) Beyond national boundaries in the study of digital public engagement: the role of Inter-parliamentary institutions and cooperation in the Austrian and Portuguese Parliaments. Policy & Internet, Online First. 

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This study assesses the role of interparliamentary institutions (IPIs) and networks in the diffusion of new ideas and solutions of (digital) public engagement in national parliaments by using elite semi-structured interviews from  two  case  studies, Austria and Portugal. Evidence collected shows that both parliaments are strongly relying on IPIsto develop and implement digital public engagement activities to stay informed, eliminate the possibility of failure, reduce the administrative costs and uncertainty of IT planning and new experiences, and comply with standards of what is perceived to be a legitimate parliament. By showing that IPIs are vehicles of (digital) public engagement  diffusion—parliaments  learn  from and  emulate  other  parliaments  perceived as successful through these institutions—this study has significant implications for our understanding of public engagement as well as of interparliamentary cooperation

Serra-Silva, S., (2021) How Parliaments engage with citizens? Online public engagement: a comparative analysis of Parliamentary websites, The Journal of Legislative Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13572334.2021.1896451

This article explores how parliaments in Europe are adopting digital media to promote public engagement with citizens. Drawing on a meta-analysis of previous similar studies and a content analysis of parliamentary websites,  the article concludes that parliaments are selective in their public engagement activities, are still mainly using ICT to  report parliamentary business, and are timidly embracing the opportunities brought on by ICT to actively engage citizens. Two innovative mechanisms found in the analysis are discussed in detail: cases of online discussion forums and digital debates on social media and cases of crowdsourcing platforms that integrate citizens’ views into the law-making process.

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Serra-Silva, S., Rã, M., Ferreira, D. and Carvalho, L. (2020, forthcoming)"As Eleições Europeias de 2019 em Portugal: Um teste à geringonça?" [Election Report]. Relações Internacionais, 62.

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The 2019 European Parliament elections were especially interesting in Portugal. They took place four months before the Portuguese legislative election and for this reason they worked as a first-round test for the “contrapation” – for the Socialist Party (ps) and its partners in the left flank but also for the opposition. In this article we briefly discuss the nature and characteristics of the European elections, drawing on the predictability power of the second-order elections model. This article takes a longitudinal perspective, by comparing the European elections with the 2014 european contest and the legislative elections that took place in 2019 and in 2015.

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Serra-Silva, S. and Belchior, A. M. (2020) “Understanding the pledge fulfilment of opposition parties using evidence from Portugal”. European Politics and Society, 21(1).

DOI: 10.1080/23745118.2019.1605961

Under what conditions are opposition parties better at delivering on their electoral promises? Existing approaches to party mandates typically focus on governmental mandates and have disregarded the roles of other parties in parliament. However, such approaches encompass an imbalance regarding the comparison of pledge fulfilment between governing and opposition parties, and specially neglect the differences between permanent and alternating opposition. This article has the ambition to extend the mandate theory to opposition parties, exploring the conditions underlying their pledge fulfilment. Using a dataset of Portuguese opposition parties with more than 3000 electoral pledges for six different legislatures (1995–2015), our evidence suggests that: (1) alternating opposition parties have a significantly higher probability of fulfilling their mandate than permanent opposition; (2) opposition parties fulfil as much of their promises as the fulfilment costs decrease; (3) and the odds of opposition parties’ mandate fulfilment is also increased when there is policy congruence between the pledge and a legislative initiative.

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Espírito-Santo, A., Freire, A. and Serra-Silva, S. (2020) “Does Women’s descriptive representation matter for policy preferences? The role of political parties”. Party Politics, 26(2).

DOI: 10.1177/1354068818764011 

Although the presence of women has been increasing in several parliaments around the world, we still do not know much about the consequences that their presence has for policy representation. Relying on a rich comparative dataset on prospective MPs’ policy preferences in 12 countries and 87 political parties collected between 2006 and 2012 within the Comparative Candidates Survey, this article aims to understand how political parties interplay with prospective MPs’ sex to affect the latter’s policy preferences. Our results show that the descriptive representation of women makes a difference for policy representation, (i) mainly (though not only) when issues that particularly affect women are at stake and (ii) only concerning issues around which political parties do not yet have settled positions (i.e. uncrystallized issues). There are therefore empirical grounds to support an imposed representation of minority groups to deal with issues that are new on the political agenda.