Crisis de Estado y acciones colectivas en la revolución portuguesa

Abstract

The main idea of this dissertation is that the political process known as the Portuguese transition to democracy (1974-1976) is best understood as a State crisis. In the different chapters, we analyze the nature of the crisis as such, in a structural level, and try to understand its effects at the tactical level, where mobilizations take place. After a theoretical debate, where we take some tools from contemporary literature on social movements, we make four different approaches to our subject. First, we analyze the substance of the State crisis as a crisis of authority, trying to understand the processes that left no coercive means at the provisional governments’ disposal. Then, we analyze one of the most characteristic social movements that flourished in the state crisis, the dwellers’ movement. The main goal will be to highlight the relational ties that explain the opportunity for the development of popular movements in a State crisis. In the third chapter, we are interested in the level of strategic interaction of contentious political actors. There we analyze the “duel” of political manifestations that took place during the transition and we evaluate the effects of popular mobilization upon third actors and, therefore, upon democratization. In the fifth chapter we narrow the focus and we try to explain a sole and only question: why was there anticommunist popular violence in some conservative districts? Why was it absent in some others? There again, the nature of State crisis will give us the clue. Finally, in the last chapter, we analyze the mobilization and expectations coordination processes that made possible the reintegration of the different coercive apparatuses of the State and, thereby, close the crisis.