ABSTRACT
Despite its overall stability, Portugal has recently experienced incremental changes in the electoral, parliamentary and governing arenas. Using the leading indicators of party system change (fragmentation, volatility, polarization) and parties’ legislative votes and voting distances in parliament, we assess the extent to which the party system dynamics in the 21st century, especially in the wake of the post-2015 general election events, have changed. While most of the traditional indicators of party system change (volatility and fragmentation) depict a picture of stability and continuity over the years, electoral and party polarization has increased considerably in recent years as well as parties’ disagreement in the parliamentary arena, compared to the early 2000s. In this chapter, we combine different data sources and make use of computational methods, which to the best of our knowledge have never previously been applied together to the Portuguese case, to offer a broad perspective of party system dynamics in Portugal and to offer an exploratory and tentative answer to a pertinent question: how much have Portuguese politics changed over the past few years? To what extent has the party system, that up until now has been known to be quite stable, changed recently?
