Researcher João Ferreira Dias recently published two new works that address 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 Centre for Populism Studies (2026), the author analyses the erosion of trust in liberal democracy and proposes measures to strengthen transparency in the formation of party lists and open regulated channels of civic access to political recruitment as a way of mitigating the appeal of populist discourse.
The second article, Contested narratives: Portuguese maritime heritage in gatekeepers’ discourses, published in the journal European Political Science, by Cambridge University Press, examines the disputes surrounding the Portuguese maritime epic in parliamentary discourse, highlighting the left–right polarisation and differing positions among political actors regarding the revision of historical narratives.