João Ferreira Dias publishes two new works on democracy and political memory

Researcher João Ferreira Dias has recently published two new works addressing key challenges facing contemporary democracies.

In the policy paper Opening the Political Pipeline: Transparency and Civic Access to Party Lists as an Antidote to Populist Distrust, published by the European Center for Populism Studies (2026), the author analyses the erosion of trust in liberal democracy and proposes measures to increase transparency in how party lists are drawn up and to open regulated avenues for civic access to political recruitment, as a way of reducing the appeal of populist discourse.

The second work, the article Contested narratives: Portuguese maritime heritage in gatekeepers’ discourses, published in European Political Science (Cambridge University Press), examines disputes over the Portuguese maritime epic in parliamentary debates, highlighting left–right polarisation and the differing positions of political actors on revising historical narratives.

Read the policy paper here and the article here.

Originally published by CEI-Iscte.