Populism and Non-partisan Presidents: Democratization and Crisis of Representation in a Comparative Perspective

The decreasing interest on traditional parties’ interest, amongst electors, seems to be fulfilled by immediate, radical, non-conventional or non-democratic solutions that are meant to be applied to urgent and complex problems, such as terrorism, immigration, high unemployment rates or environment preoccupations. At the same time, the number of non-partisan candidates increased and it seems to be a tendency in Presidential elections, in several democracies, mainly in Europe, being this the case of Portugal. Based on Passareli’s contributions about non-partisan Presidents, we are looking to analyse this increase and its relation with the populist wave of leaders born in democratic regimes. Within this scenario, we propose to revise and discuss the concept of populism, and how it seems to be strongly emerging on the political scene, meaning to look like, in political communication terms, fundamental to sustain and develop the democratic system. This contribution considers the following starting question: What are the main message features of populist presidential candidates in a non-partisan democracy such as the Portuguese? Considering this, we aim to identify the key dimensions of the political message, mainly looking at the political campaign slogans produced between 1976 and 2016. In methodological terms, this contribution uses the content analysis technique, applied to the electoral slogans of presidential candidates during democracy, i.e. after 1976 first presidential elections. The analysis is based on Taggert’s (2003) identification of populism features and on Espirito Santo (2006) study about the political message of the Presidents. The Portuguese presidential elections are of a non-partisan type, in a semi-presidential regime. We find out that 40 years after the election of the first independent candidate, in 1976 - Ramalho Eanes - later in 2016, we have the tendency of a growing number of independent or non-partisan candidates running for presidential elections. The expected results are contributing to identify and to discuss about the role of populism on non-partisan Presidents democracies, in a comparative perspective.