ABSTRACT
Portugal inaugurated the third wave of democratization with a bloodless military coup on 25 April 1974, putting an end to four decades of dictatorship (1926–74). Unshackled by international pro-democracy forces and occurring in the midst of the Cold War, the coup led to a severe crisis aggravated by the concomitance of two processes: the transition to democracy and the end of what was the last European colonial empire (Pinto 2003). As Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan have noted, 'we all too often tend to see [Portugal] in the framework set by later transitions processes', forgetting the greater degree of uncertainty and the 'extreme conflict path' of the regime change (Linz and Stepan 1996).
