Alexandre Afonso

Carsten Jensen (2014) The Right and the Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 176 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-967841-9 Book review forthcoming in Czech Sociological Review The Right and the Welfare State addresses the behaviour of right-wing governments in welfare state reforms, particularly in the domains of health and unemployment. In this book, Carsten Jensen challenges two…

The graph above plots GDP per capita in 2014 in current USD (Data from the world bank) and average years of schooling per country from the Barro and Lee dataset. There is an interactive version of the graph here where you can select groups of countries. As the plot shows, income per capita of course increases…

I came across interesting figures showing that the country with the highest proportion of women in top managerial positions is Russia. The United States lags way behind with 21%, as do the Scandinavian countries, which one would have expected to lead this ranking. This is interesting because Russia is not the most obvious candidate for such…

This graph shows the maximum, mean and minimum turnout in parliamentary elections in OECD countries between 1960 and 2013. Data comes from the Armingeon CPS dataset. The United States is by far the country with the lowest levels of turnout, mainly due to the weak interest in midterms. Switzerland also has very low levels of…

My co-authors Sotirios Zartaloudis and Yannis Papadopoulos and me have a letter in the FT today reacting to an article on Portugal as an outlier among bailed-out countries. It draws on our article in the Journal of European Public Policy.

I have given an interview to the I newspaper on Syriza, populism and the Euro. You can read it below (in Portuguese)

Following up on the previous post on education and interest in politics, I have been looking at data from the European Social Survey on party choice and income levels in Portugal. The graph above is based on the latest round of the European Social Survey. Data for upper income levels in particular (8, 9, and 10th…

In a post published on the LSE EUROPP blog, I showed that the proportion of people that do not have any interest in politics whatsoever is much larger in Portugal than in other similar countries. This might be a reason why there hasn’t been an upsurge in support for radical left alternatives in spite of…

Portugal was one of the countries hardest hit by the Eurozone crisis, yet in contrast to countries such as Greece and Spain, there has been no sharp rise in support for radical left or anti-establishment parties. Ahead of the next Portuguese legislative election on 4 October, Alexandre Afonso writes that there are a number of…