Alexandre Afonso

Alexandre Afonso

Leiden University

Category: Uncategorized

  • Is the over-consumption of Vodka a good thing for women’s empowerment?

    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… Read.

  • Electoral turnout in OECD countries, 1960-2013

    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… Read.

  • Our Letter in in the FT on parties in Greece and Portugal

    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. Read.

  • Why is there no Syriza in Portugal?

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

  • Income levels and party choice in Portugal

    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… Read.

  • Education levels an interest in politics: the Portuguese outlier

    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… Read.

  • Why the next Portuguese election will not see the surge of a left-wing challenger like Podemos or Syriza

    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… Read.

  • Does better research mean better teaching?

    Does research performance increase the quality of teaching, or does it hamper it? Many people say that there is a positive relationship between research performance and teaching quality. Research should feed back into teaching and vice-versa. Following this logic, there should be a clearly positive relationship between student satisfaction (with the obvious problems of taking this… Read.

  • An Interactive Map of West European Parties

    Following on the previous post on Southern Europe, this is a map of all West European parties mapped along their economic policy positioning and their position on European integration. By clicking here, you get access to a large interactive version of the map where you can show and hide countries and zoom in and out.… Read.

  • A Map of the South European Party System

    There has been a lot of discussion recently about the rise of left-wing Euroscepticism in Southern Europe in the midst of the Eurozone crisis, with parties like Syriza and Podemos conquering power (in the case of the former) or appearing as serious challengers to mainstream parties (in the case of the latter). In the graphs… Read.