Regime discontinuities involving the replacement of the governing elite as well as the
reshaping of fundamental institutions and values are a distinctive feature of the political
history of modern Portugal. The purpose of this contribution is to assess the impact of these
successive regime changes on the composition and patterns of recruitment of Cabinet
ministers-the core group of decision-makers-and to point out the most significant trends over
time: that is, from the mid-nineteenth century, when the Constitutional Monarchy was …

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the impact of regime changes in the
composition and patterns of recruitment of the Portuguese ministerial elite throughout the
last 150 years. The 'out-of-type', violent nature of most regime transformations accounts for
the purges in and the extensive replacements of the political personnel, namely of the
uppermost officeholders. In the case of Cabinet members, such discontinuities did not imply,
however, radical changes in their social profile. Although there were some significant …