Sedes: an Example of Opposition in a Conservative Authoritarian State

Abstract

MANY COMMENTATORS HAVE DESCRIBED AND ANALYSED POLITICAL opositions in both democratic and authoritarian political systems. Scholars like Dahl, Lipset and Rokkan, Ionescu and Madariaga and Linz have advanced abroad taxonomies of oppositions. All seem to suffer from the difficulty in application to the specific political situation. Whether it be Dahl's categories of hegemony, polyarchy , near hegemony and near polyarchy ; Lipset and Rokkan's cleavages between church and state, landed estate and entrepreneur, employers and workers, and central and regional; or Ionescu and Madariaga's models which are based on the reasons an opposition is banned in a particular system, all have proved inadequate in describing the Portuguese opposition under Marcello Caetano. Even Linz's models of semi-opposition, alegal, and illegal opposition have failed to describe an opposition which is a combination of a semi-opposition and an alegal oposition. The object of this paper is to add information to the body of literature on oppositions within authoritarian systems and to provide a qualification to the Linz models, the semi-oppositionalegal opposition.