Transitional Justice versus ‘Transitional Legacies’: Comparing Issue Salience and the Role of Ideology in the Case of Portugal

In democratic transitions that do not involve negotiations between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ elite, autocratic leaderships collapse, are ejected or overthrown, and, together with their collaborators, are often jailed, purged from public administration, exiled and/or deprived of their political rights. This is part of a process of coming to terms with the past designated as transitional justice. In Portugal, this transitional justice process became tangled with a process of crisis and revolution characterized by extensive Nationalizations and a deep Agrarian Reform. With democratic consolidation, a process of ‘coping with the transition’ emerged which has not been sufficiently explored in the literature. In this chapter, we attempt to answer the following question: how did Portuguese political parties handle the simultaneous process of dealing with the legacies of the authoritarian past and the legacies of the democratic transition? Were the two issues equally salient in party’s strategies? To what extent can the left-right divide explain the behavior of parliamentary parties in the two cases? The chapter compares the behavior of Portuguese political parties during the parliamentary decision-making process regarding transitional justice bills and ‘transitional’ bills from 1976 to 2015. Transitional justice bills include all legislative proposals that aim at dealing with the authoritarian past and are divided in four axes: historical investigation and truth, justice and reconciliation, reparation and acknowledgement, and education and memorialization. ‘Transitional’ bills include all legislative proposals that aim at dealing with the legacies of the democratic transition and are divided into the same four axes. The first part examines the main similarities and differences in parties’ discourse and behavior in both situations. The second part examines to what extent ideology – understood as the left/right cleavage – matters to explain how parties vote both kinds of bills.