69 INTRODUCTION In the past decades, the topic of the legitimacy of the democratic system has widely preoccupied political scientists. This has been an important topic as, on the one hand, since at least the 1970s, there has been an increasing trend toward disaffection with politics as well as heightened levels of political cyni- cism among electorates in most Western democracies. Even though initially scholars tended to focus on single countries and their national particularities (the first and best known example being the literature on the impact of the Vietnam War and Watergate in the USA; e.g., Nye et al. 1997), recent schol- arship acknowledges the cross-national dynamic of the phenomenon. Furthermore, the occurrence of events of transnational importance such as the economic crisis which originated in the USA in 2008 but quickly migrated to Europe has reinforced incremental changes that are associated with longer-term societal transformations. It becomes harder to deny that the decline of citizens’ trust in political institutions, for example, across different Western countries (Bosco and Verney 2012; Belchior 2015; Teixeira et al. 2016) needs to be attributed to a significant extent to processes and experi- ences that transcend circumstances of solely national importance. Following previous work that looked at the effects of the crisis on demo- cratic legitimacy and trust toward political institutions in Portugal (Teixeira et al. 2014, 2015, 2016), the present chapter focuses on the aftermath of the economic crisis. To reach this goal, we compare Portuguese citizens’ Chapter 3 Democratic Legitimacy and Trust in Political Institutions in Portugal before and after the Great Recession Transitory or Lasting Effects? Emmanouil Tsatsanis and Ana Maria Belchior Lisi, Freire, and Tsatsanis_9781793601155.indb 69 13-03-2020 14:15:20