Elections, configurations and cleavages: comment on the results of the 1995 elections

Abstract

An analysis of elections may be restricted to its utilitarian sense of identifying who wins or it may go further and interpret the attitudes of the electorate and fluctuations of the electorate between different elections. The type of interpretation adopted in this article is the latter, with the idea of incorporating the behaviour of the electorate in a long-term interpretation of the political dynamics in Portugal between 1975 and 1995. It enables us to identify highly accentuated fluctuations in the electorate, showing that it is an active protagonist in the country's political evolution in conjugation with institutional articulation and, in particular, with the role of the President of the Republic in anticipating elections. The critical factor of this electoral behaviour is, however, abstention as a sign of the electorate's saturation in relation to its previous choice, which justifies the conclusion that elections are lost before they can be won.