Manufacturing Consent and Dissent: Protagonists and Themes of the First Wave of Associative Congresses in Portugal (1865-1934)

Abstract This article analyses the emergence of a new repertoire of collective action in Portugal, the associative congresses, seeking to clarify their nature and impacts. This study comes from the census and analysis of the 304 associative congresses organized in Portugal since the 1st Social Congress, in 1865, until the imposition of corporatism, in 1934, with a total of 1733 theses debated in all of them. As a result, we were able to characterize this phenomenon as an overall process of political mobilization, distinguishing its actors, alliances, and antagonisms, and evaluating, through these sources, the evolution of different political “fields” during the crisis of liberalism. This observation is fundamental to understand the origin of the social and political polarisation that preceded the longest European dictatorship.