Objectivos:
<p>O nosso objecto é o de construir um mapa histórico-analítico dos principais conflitos políticos, sociais e ideológicos que, no nosso país, se vêm desenvolvendo em torno dos direitos sociais, da sua interpretação, conteúdo e aplicação, centrando-nos em dois dos direitos consagrados na nossa Constituição: a saúde e a educação. Mais concretamente, ao longo do projecto iremos: 1) extrair da literatura relevante na área da ciência política um conjunto de hipóteses sobre as causas da "escolha constitucional" relativa aos direitos sociais; 2) avaliar a plausibilidade destas hipóteses através dos estudos de caso dos direitos constitucionais à saúde e à educação em Portugal. </p>
State of the art:
Our research on the origins, development, interpretation and contestation of social and economic rights in Portugal is framed under two general strands of theoretical and empirical research. On the one hand, our analysis will draw upon a vast ?constitutional pre-commitment? literature (Elster, 2000; Elster and Slagstad, 1988; Alexander 1998; Whytock, 2004), as well as upon previous work on social and economic rights as citizenship rights (Hunt, 1996, Eide, 2001). This literature provides us with a number of hypotheses trying to account for why, in what circumstances, and under what conditions constitutions are likely to be drafted in order to contain provisions obligating future majorities to adopt (or preventing them from adopting) particular policies. On the other hand, we will draw upon studies on institutional origins and change, particularly those affiliated with the so-called ?historical institutionalism? (Steinmo et al., 1992; Pierson, 2000; Lindner & Rittberger, 2003). One of the core contributions of both these approaches is not only their concern with avoiding functional accounts of the origins of institutions ? according to which the effects of institutions were supposed to explain the presence of those institutions ? but also a concern with understanding the dynamic relation between the creation of norms and their consequences. In this regard, our contention is that, following Knight (1992), the separation between institutional creation (?games over rules?) and operation (?games within rules?) is inevitably blurred as soon as one realizes that the game over outcomes is supplemented by further battles over rules and their interpretation. In particular, we argue that the evolution of institutions should be studied as a ?moving picture? rather than a ?photograph?. <br /><br />In this sense, we propose to analytically separate the institutional creation and institutional operation phases and demonstrate that it is in exploring their linkage that we find a key to understand subsequent institutional developments, i.e. the degree to which institutions are stable or contested. At the level of institutional creation, several dimensions need to be analyzed. Approaches that have treated institutional design from a rational choice perspective tend to give greater emphasis to the pursuit of distributional benefits on the part of the political actors involves. From this point of view, the different preferences about institutional and policy outcomes of the actors involved in the constitution-making process, their present balance of power and their level of uncertainty both about the consequences of constitutional rules and about the future balance of power are likely to affect the shape of the rules that end up being chosen in the institutional choice phase (Geddes 1995).
