# We Are We

## A nation is not what its leaders decide. It is what its people repeatedly do.

There is a sentence we have all said, probably this week: "this country is just like that." We say it in the queue someone jumped, at the public works project running late, at the favour asked for "off the books", at the news of yet another politician caught out. And when we say it, we always point upwards: they steal, they don't fix things, they don't invest, they don't govern.

Who are "they"?

In a democracy, politicians do not belong to a different species. They came from the same schools, the same companies, the same families, the same café tables. They share, to a greater or lesser degree, the same social norms as the rest of us. Which is why the more interesting question is not "why do we have these politicians?" but rather: what features of our society make these behaviours possible?

This essay defends a thesis that is simple to state and uncomfortable to accept: a nation is not an entity external to its inhabitants. It is continuously produced by them. Leaders matter, institutions matter, history matters. But a society is also the accumulated result of millions of everyday behaviours that determine what counts as normal, tolerable, condemnable and possible. A nation is not merely governed by its citizens. It is, every single day, reproduced by them.

## The daily plebiscite

In 1882, at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan asked the question that gives his most famous lecture its title: what is a nation? And he rejected every easy answer. It is not race, not language, not religion, not geography. A nation, Renan said, is a spiritual principle resting on two things: the common possession of a legacy of memories, and the present consent to live together. His formula became celebrated: the existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite.

Benedict Anderson took the idea further in "Imagined Communities" (1983). A nation is an imagined community, not because it is false, but because millions of people who will never meet one another manage to imagine themselves as belonging to the same "we". And that communion is always conceived as a horizontal comradeship: it is the solidarity generated at the base, not the command of the state, that leads people to sacrifice themselves for a collective project.

From this follows the first essential idea: the state is an organisation; the nation is a relationship between people. Portugal is not the Assembly of the Republic, the Government or the public administration. Portugal is also what happens when two people who do not know each other decide whether they can trust one another. When we find a wallet. When we ask for a receipt. When we see someone jump a queue. When we vote. When we don't vote. When we say "it's always like this around here." That last gesture may be the most important of all, because it is at that moment that a behaviour stops being an exception and starts becoming culture.

## Subjects or citizens

In 1963, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba published "The Civic Culture", the study that founded the comparative analysis of political cultures. They distinguished three ways in which a people relates to its country. In a parochial culture, the citizen barely knows that central power exists. In a subject culture, the citizen knows the state but relates to it passively: receiving services, receiving decisions, receiving fate. In a participant culture, the citizen feels that the system is also made by them, that their action counts, that the res publica is literally their own affair.

The distinction is sixty years old and has never been more current. Whoever says "they don't fix things" is speaking as a subject. Whoever asks "what can I do so that this gets fixed?" is speaking as a citizen. The same person can be both things on the same day. The difference lies neither in the passport nor in the job title. It lies in the posture.

And there is a historical reason why we slid into the posture of the subject. After the Second World War, and for very good reasons, we built an extraordinary culture of rights: human rights, social rights, consumer rights, patient rights. It was one of the great civilisational achievements of the twentieth century. But along the way we lost the other side of the coin: duties. Not duties as a burden or a sermon, but duties as an opportunity. The question "what am I owed?" always has a short and bitter answer. The question "how am I going to change the society around me? how am I going to contribute? how am I going to take the wheel?" is the only one that opens a future. We were educated to demand and we unlearned how to build. A country of people who only demand is a country handed over to whoever decides. A country of people who build is a country that decides.

## Small decisions are not that small

This could remain in the realm of pretty ideas. It does not, because it has been measured.

In 2019, the journal Science published an extraordinary study. Researchers handed in more than 17,000 apparently lost wallets in 355 cities across 40 countries — at banks, hotels, museums and police stations — and measured how many people contacted the supposed owner. They found systematic differences between societies. And one surprise: in almost every country, wallets containing money were returned with higher probability than empty ones. Social behaviour is not merely economic calculation. We carry norms of honesty, reputation and moral identity around with us.

Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel found an even better natural laboratory: United Nations diplomats in New York, at a time when diplomatic immunity removed all consequences for parking fines. Same streets, same laws, same city, no punishment. Diplomats from more corrupt countries accumulated significantly more unpaid fines. When New York gained the power to remove licence plates, violations plummeted. The experiment demonstrates two things at once: we carry our culture with us, and institutions can modify behaviour. It is not culture or institutions. It is culture and institutions.

And there is a third study, published in Nature by Simon Gächter and Jonathan Schulz, with 2,568 young people from 23 countries: those who grew up in societies with a higher prevalence of corruption, tax evasion and fraud showed, on average, lower intrinsic honesty in laboratory tests. This is not a verdict on nationalities. It is something more interesting and more serious: the moral environment in which we grow up shapes our own perception of what is acceptable. A society educates us long before a school does. We educate one another.

If everyone double-parks, double-parking stops looking like a transgression. If everyone pulls strings, string-pulling becomes a normal social mechanism. If dodging taxes gets told around the dinner table as cleverness, tax morale shifts. A culture is not what a society says it values. It is what it rewards, tolerates and repeats.

## Trust is invisible infrastructure

Robert Putnam spent twenty years studying why the regional governments created in Italy in 1970, all with the same institutional design, worked so well in the North and so badly in the South. The answer he found in "Making Democracy Work" (1993) was not in the oversight bodies, but in the choirs, the sports clubs and the cultural associations. He called it social capital: the networks, norms and trust that facilitate coordinated action. And he left a conclusion that ought to be posted in every ministry: it is civil society that creates wealth, not wealth that creates civil society.

The evidence has accumulated since. Knack and Keefer showed that trust and civic norms are associated with economic performance. Tabellini found the same relationship across European regions. Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales showed that, in higher-trust Italian regions, households make greater use of financial markets and firms have better access to credit. In the world values surveys, more than 65% of Danes, Norwegians and Finns say that "most people can be trusted."

Why does this matter so much? Because trust reduces costs. Imagine two societies. In one, every contract needs thirty pages, every transaction demands guarantees, entrepreneurs assume they will be cheated and citizens assume the state will cheat them. In the other, most people keep their word, and contracts need not anticipate every imaginable form of fraud. The second society has invisible infrastructure. It does not appear in the motorways or directly in GDP, but it allows practically everything to work better.

And there is a perverse cycle hidden here, identified by Aghion, Algan, Cahuc and Shleifer: low-trust societies demand more regulation from the state, and more regulation hinders the development of the very social capital that would solve the problem. Distrust generates regulation, which generates distrust. This is how different societies stay different for decades. Not through some national essence, but because behaviours feed on themselves. At a certain point we say "this country is just like that." But the country did not fall from the sky that way. We built the equilibrium.

## So are leaders not responsible?

They are. Very much so. And this is where the thesis has to stay honest.

Jones and Olken studied leadership changes caused by unexpected deaths in office and found robust evidence that individual leaders alter economic trajectories. But the effect was much larger in autocracies, where there were fewer constraints on power. The conclusion is precious: the better a society's institutions, the less that society depends on the moral quality of a single person. Perhaps this is the best definition of a developed country: not the one that always finds extraordinary rulers, but the one that works reasonably well even when its rulers are mediocre.

Acemoglu and Robinson, Nobel laureates in Economics in 2024, showed in "Why Nations Fail" that nations prosper with inclusive institutions and wither with extractive ones. But the book's decisive point is frequently forgotten: there is nothing natural about the emergence of inclusive institutions. They arise when those who lose out under the system organise themselves and force change. Institutions do not fall from the sky. They are won from the bottom up.

And citizens, when they have information and mechanisms, do in fact discipline politicians. Brazil provided the almost perfect experiment: from 2003, municipalities were randomly selected for federal audits whose results were published. Ferraz and Finan found that disclosing corruption reduced the re-election of those involved, especially where local radio existed to spread the information. Mayors eligible for re-election diverted around 27% fewer resources. The voter is not merely a consumer of politics. They can be part of the control mechanism.

Responsibility, however, is not symmetrical. An unemployed person and a prime minister do not have the same capacity to determine a nation's fate. A citizen of a dictatorship cannot be held responsible in the way a citizen of a democracy can. Power generates responsibility, and the greater the power, the greater the responsibility. But it does not follow that those with little power have zero responsibility. Responsibility for a society is unequal, but it is distributed.

## The Portugal chapter: between exit and voice

If there is a country where this thesis takes on flesh, it is ours. And the story begins in the best possible way.

In the early hours of 25 April 1974, the soldiers of the MFA were asking over the radio for people to stay at home. The people, thankfully, disobeyed. They took to the streets, followed Salgueiro Maia's columns from the Terreiro do Paço to the Largo do Carmo, and a woman named Celeste Caeiro handed out carnations to the soldiers, giving the revolution its name. It was a military coup that only became a democratic revolution because citizens decided to be part of it. In the first free elections, in 1975, abstention was around 8%. For a moment, we were one of the most participatory peoples in Europe.

Fifty years on, the numbers tell a different story. Generalised trust in others hovers around 17% in Portugal, against 74% in Denmark. On volunteering we sit at the bottom of the European table, at roughly 12% against an average of 24%. The share of Portuguese belonging to no association at all rose from 66% in 1990 to 84% in 2008, a legacy of illiteracy and of the ban on free association under the Estado Novo. Abstention in legislative elections went from 8% in 1975 to a record 51% in 2019, and has stayed above 40% since 2009. And in the 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index we recorded our worst result ever.

Half a century of the Estado Novo trained us in the culture of the subject: the state decided, the people received, and free association was forbidden. The 25th of April gave us back the rights of citizens in a single day; the posture of citizens is something we are still building.

Albert Hirschman gave us, in 1970, the exact vocabulary for reading this portrait. Faced with the deterioration of an organisation or a country, we have two responses: exit (leaving, emigrating, giving up) and voice (protesting, demanding, changing things from within). Portugal, a country of historic emigration, has too often chosen exit. And there is a form of exit subtler than the airport: staying, but giving up. Blaming "them" is the most comfortable way of leaving without leaving. Complaint is the abstention of everyday life.

## The country is made of those who stay

Exit is not a metaphor. It is our oldest constant. The historian Vitorino Magalhães Godinho called Portuguese emigration a "structural constant" of our history, the thread linking the men who left the Tagus in the fifteenth century to those departing today from Humberto Delgado airport. The Discoveries were, among many other things, the first great export of our most adventurous. Between 1960 and 1974, close to a million and a half Portuguese left, an average of a hundred thousand a year, most of them clandestinely, "a salto", for France and Germany. During the troika crisis the film repeated itself: some 120,000 departures in 2013 alone. Today, according to United Nations estimates published by the Emigration Observatory, there are 1.8 million people born in Portugal living abroad, a rate of 17.3% relative to the resident population, one of the largest accumulated diasporas in Europe. And the hardest figure of all: around three in every ten Portuguese born in the country and aged between 15 and 39 — more than 850,000 people — now live outside it. A study by the Porto Academic Federation concluded that more than 73% of higher education students are considering emigrating and a quarter have already decided to go.

Now, the economics of migration shows that those who leave are not a random sample of those who stay. Since Chiswick and Borjas we have known that emigration tends to select the most motivated, the most risk-tolerant, the least resigned: leaving requires exactly the initiative that is missing to change things at home. An honest qualification: this is not mainly about diplomas. The Bank of Portugal showed in 2025 that young emigrants are not, on average, more qualified than those who stay (31% with higher education against 39% among residents, in 2021). The selection is one of attitude, not of certificates. And the Estado Novo itself knew exactly what it was doing: in 1969, a senior Foreign Affairs official admitted that, without the departure of a million people over the previous two decades, the country would face "tragic consequences of a political order". Emigration was, for decades, the escape valve that relieved the pressure that would have forced change. Read through Hirschman, the mechanism is clear: every departure of someone unresigned is a voice the country loses. Not by chance, the period of our history with the least emigration was the one that followed the 25th of April, when voice was at last given to everyone. The country is made of those who stay. All the more reason for those who stay not to give up as well.

## Hard-working but not productive

There is a second Portuguese paradox that deserves to be faced head-on, because it dismantles the easy accusation and points to the real cause. Each of us is a hero in our own life: we struggle, we work, sometimes from dawn to dusk. The numbers confirm the effort. We work, on average, 37.4 hours a week against 35.9 in the European Union, and we are among the EU countries with the most people putting in 49 hours or more. And yet our productivity per hour was, in 2025, just 66.8% of the European average, the fourth lowest in the Union, according to Eurostat. Each hour of work generates around 54 euros of wealth in Portugal, against 65 on the OECD average. It is not a lack of effort. It is a lack of results.

And results are measured by comparison. In 2001, Portugal stood at 84.1% of the European average in GDP per capita; in 2024 it stood at 82.4%. More than twenty years to get back to the starting point, while Czechia, Slovenia and Lithuania — which joined the Union eighteen years after us — overtook us, with Estonia and Poland right behind. When we compare ourselves with northern Europe and with the new economies of the east, we keep falling behind.

The temptation is to moralise about the worker. That would be factually wrong: someone who works 37 hours and produces 54 euros an hour is not lazy, they are embedded in a poor system. The research points to structural causes: firms that are too small (microenterprises are more than 92% of the fabric), little capital, and above all weak management. The World Management Survey by Bloom, Sadun and Van Reenen consistently places Portugal at the bottom of the European table for management practices, and around half of Portuguese employers have, at most, basic schooling, against 17% on the EU average. A people can work a great deal and produce little if it is organised into poor systems. Productivity is born of organised intelligence, not of sweat.

And there is one last facet of this paradox, the most Portuguese of all: we know how to diagnose, but not how to act. We are a country of brilliant reports, national strategies and plans that rarely leave the page. The study by Nuno Palma and James Robinson, Nobel laureate in Economics, commissioned by the CIP and released in 2026, puts it bluntly: Portugal does not fail for want of diagnoses, but through difficulties of execution, with the slowness of administrative justice operating "as a tax on those who dare to challenge the state". It is the collective version of the same pattern: we diagnose a lot and execute little, just as we work a lot and yield little, just as we leave instead of changing things. Three symptoms, one disease: the energy exists; what does not is the system that turns it into results.

But that same Portuguese history refutes fatalism. On 12 March 2011, the Geração à Rasca brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets in the largest non-party demonstration since the 25th of April, convened over the internet, under a slogan borrowed from Saramago: to make every citizen a politician. More than 90% of Portuguese firefighters are volunteers, sustained by 413 humanitarian associations, in one of the country's oldest associative traditions. The Casa para Viver movement brought together dozens of organisations and filled streets in more than twenty cities between 2023 and 2024. Climate students expected 500 people at a protest in Lisbon and more than 6,000 turned up. The civic capacity exists. What is missing is making it a habit rather than an exception.

## We make the system and then the system makes us

Perhaps the real subject of this essay is not even politics. It is emergence.

No fish creates a shoal. No bee creates a hive. No neuron creates consciousness. No individual person creates Portuguese culture. But aggregate behaviour produces properties that exist in none of the parts. A nation is an emergent phenomenon: millions of small decisions producing a much larger thing called society.

A child is born inside institutions, norms and habits it did not choose. It learns them. It reproduces some, rejects others, modifies a few. Then it passes a version of that world on to the next generation. This is how a culture persists. It is also, by exactly the same mechanism, how it changes.

That is why I will not write the easy line that every people gets the rulers it deserves. It is simplistic and, in many contexts, unjust. What I write instead is this: we do not always get the country we deserve, but over time we tend to reproduce the country whose behaviours we normalise, whose institutions we tolerate and whose values we practise.

## And what if we don't win?

There remains the hardest reader to convince: the well-informed cynic. The one who has read this far and asks, with every apparent justification, "but is it worth it? does my gesture change anything? are we going to win?"

The question seems sensible and it is a trap. It is the logic of permanent calculation: I act only if the spreadsheet guarantees a result. Applied to citizenship, this mentality is a recipe for disaster, because no individual civic gesture guarantees a result, and therefore the calculation always recommends inertia. If everyone calculates that way, the outcome is guaranteed: nothing changes, and the cynic gets to say they were right. The prophecy fulfils itself.

There are two answers. The first is statistical and we have already given it: gestures aggregate, and culture is made of their sum. The second is ethical, and it runs deeper. There are things one does because they are right, win or lose. There are battles that have to be fought because what is at stake is too important, and because we want to be on the right side of history. I do not control whether my neighbour will do the right thing. I control whether I do it. And if things go badly, let it not be because of me.

Someone who acts this way is not being naïve. They are refusing to be a subject. A citizen's dignity does not depend on the outcome; it depends on the posture. And, irony of ironies, it is precisely in societies where many people act without a guaranteed result that results eventually arrive.

## Tomorrow morning's plebiscite

Renan said that a nation is a daily plebiscite. Perhaps today we can update the idea: a nation is a daily decision. Not only the extraordinary decision we take at a ballot box every four years, but the banal decision we take when nobody is watching.

The receipt we ask for or don't. The queue we respect or jump. The association we give or don't give two hours a month to. The vote we use or waste. The favour we accept or refuse. The phrase "it's always like this around here", which we repeat or interrupt.

None of these gestures changes a country. All of them, aggregated and repeated, are the country.

Because, in the end, we are not living in somebody else's country.

We are the country.

We are we.

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### Main references

Ernest Renan, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" (1882). Benedict Anderson, "Imagined Communities" (1983). Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, "The Civic Culture" (1963). Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America" (1835). E. P. Thompson, "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963). Robert Putnam, "Making Democracy Work" (1993) and "Bowling Alone" (2000). Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, "Why Nations Fail" (2012), Nobel Prize in Economics 2024. Elinor Ostrom, "Governing the Commons" (1990), Nobel Prize in Economics 2009. Albert Hirschman, "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" (1970). Cohn et al., "Civic Honesty Around the Globe", Science (2019). Fisman and Miguel, "Corruption, Norms and Legal Enforcement" (NBER). Gächter and Schulz, "Intrinsic Honesty and the Prevalence of Rule Violations across Societies", Nature (2016). Knack and Keefer, "Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff?", QJE (1997). Tabellini, "Culture and Institutions", JEEA (2010). Aghion, Algan, Cahuc and Shleifer, "Regulation and Distrust" (NBER). Jones and Olken, "Do Leaders Matter?", QJE (2005). Ferraz and Finan, studies on audits and corruption in Brazil (QJE and NBER). Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2024. Integrated Values Surveys (WVS-EVS, 2017-2022 wave). Special Eurobarometer 75.2 on volunteering. Abstention data: CNE/Pordata. Emigration Observatory (CIES-Iscte), UN estimates 2024 and Portuguese Emigration Factbook 2024. Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, "L'émigration portugaise (XVe-XXe siècle): une constante structurale" (1978). Victor Pereira, "A Ditadura de Salazar e a Emigração" (2014). Chiswick (1978, 1999) and Borjas (1987) on migratory self-selection; Borjas, Kauppinen and Poutvaara, The Economic Journal (2019). Bank of Portugal, study on the qualifications of young emigrants (2025). CEFAP/Porto Academic Federation, study on emigration intentions 2023/2024. Eurostat, weekly hours worked and productivity per hour (2025) and GDP per capita in PPS (2001-2024). Bloom, Sadun and Van Reenen, World Management Survey. Nuno Palma and James A. Robinson, "Unlocking Portugal's Growth" (CIP/IDL, 2026).