Getting Rights Right
This period focus on a simple yet seemingly intractable paradox – Why does Portugal, the country with the highest degree of social rights constitutionalization in the world, and approaching the European Union average on social expenditure, remain one of the most unequal in the OECD, just behind Mexico and Turkey? This is the puzzle he wishes to solve in the next few years with Mónica Brito Vieira and Pedro Ramos Pinto.
The analysis of the consequences of social rights constitutionalization is, he argues, closely related to the study of their causes. Rights are often included in constitutions by political parties. That was the case of Portugal in 1975, when a single party, dictatorial system, gave way to a multiparty system, in charge of elaborating Portugal’s first democratic constitution. But what makes democratically elected legislatures so willing to transfer part of their power over to the courts in constitutionalizing rights, namely socio-economic rights, which constrain their own future political options?
Filipe Carreira da Silva believes that the solution to the first paradox is closely related to the solution to the second. To explain why rights were constitutionalized in great detail in 1975 and why they remain there virtually intact until today is to understand the history of social and political struggle over rights in Portugal.
References
Project DIREITOS SOCIAIS EM PORTUGAL I
Other institutions studying this topic:
The Center for History and Economics (Cambridge, Harvard)
see also: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/
The Oxford Centre for the Study of Inequality and Democracy
Princeton Global Network on Inequality
Forthcoming. “Democracia Deliberativa.” In José Manuel Viegas (org.), Democracia, Deliberação e Participação Política. Lisboa: Celta.
2009. “Plural Modernity. Changing Modern Institutional Forms: Disciplines and Nation-states.” Social Analysis. The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 53 (2). With Mónica Brito Vieira.
2009. “Metamorfoses do Estado. Portugal e a Emergência do Estado Neo-social.” In Renato Miguel do Carmo and João Rodrigues (eds.), Onde Pára o Estado? Políticas Públicas em Tempo de Crise. Lisboa: Edições Nelson de Matos: 19-51.