"Portugal in the 21st Century provides a thorough yet accessible picture of contemporary Portugal in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It examines and elucidates Portugal's recent trajectory, its current position, and the main challenges it faces through an examination of the...

Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device most commonly added to majority rule in national is a quorum requirement. The two most common are the participation and the approval quora. Such...

This work calculates coefficients of spatial inequalities of wealth amongst Brazilian municipalities, for each year for the period from 1920 to 2016, states of the federation, from 1939 to 2017, and amongst municipalities from each of the five Brazilians' macro-regions, from 1920 to 2016. The...

This paper estimates the dispersion of GDP per capita among Brazilian municipalities, from 1920 to 2016, and between it's states, from 1939 to 2017, by Gini index calculus. The results confirm Williamson's hypothesis (1965), that the dynamic of regional inequalities describe an inverted U...

In most instances of collective decision-making, it cannot be expected that all persons who are entitled to vote will end up doing so. This has led institutional designers, out of concerns with the “legitimacy” of decisions, to introduce quorum requirements. A prominent example of this can...

Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device most commonly added to majority rule in national is a quorum requirement. The two most common are the participation and the approval quora. Such...

The austerity policies pursued in several countries during the Eurozone crisis began to call attention to the role played by courts as relevant actors in the context of budgetary and financial policies. The case of the Portuguese Constitutional Court has often been singled out in national and...