Is it possible to profile rememberers?
We are talking about a large part of the Portuguese population. We know that there are inequalities that have been accentuated in some way, especially when it comes to age. No typical profile can be derived from this, but if we compare groups, we at least know that people over fifty have a much greater tendency to vote than people under that age. This is a typical feature. The rest also occurs in other countries, not exclusive to Portugal, but rather accentuated. And contrary to what happens in other cases, this lower propensity to vote is not always – or in a large number of cases – overcome with age. The literature describes a type of circumstance that occurs in several countries: people do not vote in the first elections and usually only vote when they are older. In the Portuguese case this did not happen. Among the younger generations, there are more people who are disconnected from politics, and this is more common than in other countries. This generational profile is important. On the other hand, inequalities in voting depending on resources and education also exist and are accentuated. Despite everything, the great characteristic that unites these people is the lack of party identification and often there is also an attitude of disinterest in politics. And there are people who, even if they are not completely disinterested, are angrier or more disillusioned or have a negative assessment of the functioning of democracy. We have different groups within this abstinence profile.
At the Policy document which he did for the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, points out a discrepancy between the registered people and the people who are not registered but live in Portugal. What causes this?
The discrepancy we estimate is already known, it is not exactly an innovation in the work. It is the discrepancy between the number of people registered in the electoral register and the number of people registered in the national territory. So among the people who are allowed to vote in all elections. On the one hand, it is between that number and the number of Portuguese adults with voting rights, which was counted by the National Institute of Statistics in the last census in 2021. This is nothing new. What we tried to bring back was to try to evaluate different explanations for this discrepancy, and the explanation that seems to us the most robust is related to the fact that there is a very significant number of Portuguese living abroad, often on a permanent basis, but who retain their voter registration and, for all purposes, their official residence in Portuguese territory. Relatively speaking, abstention in emigration circles is higher in percentage terms. But there was a very large increase in the electoral body, in the number of people registered in these constituencies, during the last term. If we evaluate the evolution in absolute numbers, we see that more people participated in the 2022 and 2019 legislatures than in the elections before this reform. How the body grew to include nearly a million voters [devido ao recenseamento obrigatório dos emigrantes]This then results in a lower participation value.
Source: DN
