An Ever-Shadowed Past? Portuguese Citizens’ Attitudes Towards the Dictatorial Regime and the Democratic Transition

Portugal, the first of the third wave of democratizations (Huntington 1991) recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of its transition to democracy. In the last four decades, there have been several studies on the Portuguese democratization process, but few authors have focused on the way citizens saw and still see the previous regime and the ‘Carnation revolution’. To what extent is the memory of the Salazar/Caetano regime eroding? Has the current economic crisis had any impact on the evaluation citizens make of the previous regime? What determines Portuguese citizens’ attitudes towards the past? These and other questions will be addressed in this paper through data collected in 2004 and 2014 by the Institute of Social Sciences and the ‘Quality of Democracy Barometer’. The empirical section will include an analysis of respondents’ classification of the previous and current regimes, their opinion on key-moments of the transition process, the identification of the main protagonists of the transition, as well as other sociological, ideological, and contextual factors.