What Are (Semi-)Presidential Elections About?: Government Losses in the 2006 Portuguese Presidential Elections

The Portuguese presidential election of 2006 represented a major upset for the incumbent Socialist Party (PS). In the March 2005 legislative elections, the PS had obtained 46.4 percent of the valid votes allowing it to form, for the first time in the history of this center-left party, a single-party cabinet supported by an absolute majority in parliament. However, less than one year later, the presidential candidate endorsed by the Socialist Party — Mário Soares, a former party leader, prime minister, and president of the republic — received only 14.3 percent of all valid votes. This paper explores four different potential accounts of this electoral outcome, each based in particular theoretical underpinnings and assumptions about electoral behavior in “less important” elections, such as presidential elections in semi-presidential regimes: “popularity contest”; “surge and decline”; “second-order” election; and “policy balancing”. On the basis of the results of a two-wave panel survey, several different hypotheses are tested concerning the determinants of vote choices and defections from the government party, and some conclusions are drawn about electoral behavior in Portugal and the potential generalization of findings to presidential elections in similar political systems. *Researcher at the Social Sciences Institute of the University of Lisbon (ICS-UL). The survey data used for this paper were the obtained under the auspices of the research program “Comportamento Eleitoral dos Portugueses”, coordinated by António Barreto at ICS-UL, and supported by ICS-UL, the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, the Tinker Foundation, the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian,the Fundação LusoAmericana para o Desenvolvimento, the Comissão Nacional the Eleições and the Secretariado Técnico dos Assuntos para o Processo Eleitoral.