Regulating self-regulating professional associations: What changes in the Portuguese context with the Law 6/2008?

Since there is a professionalization trend (Wilensky, 1964), professional associations are one of the few cases of associations which membership is not in decline, namely according to the World Values Survey data from 2000s. Most professions need to be organized as associations to be able to exert influence over the political power and this influence becomes more important when the State attributes autonomy to these associations in order to regulate the profession and defend the public interest. These professional groups thus acquire a privileged relation with the State (Halliday, 1987). In Portugal, these professional associations are named professional public associations (PPAs), also known as professional Orders. These PPAs are entities of the indirect and autonomous administration of the State (Moreira, 2003). The system of professional regulation in Portugal belongs to the most common pattern of the European Continent, in which the professional associations have the monopoly of professional regulation (Moran and Wood, 2003). The ambiguity of interests defended, private or public, is a characteristic of these associations (Candler, 2000; Moreira, 2003). Therefore, many times, when contributing towards the control of work, of the market, etc., these professional associations are responsible for the collision of public interest with professional interest. In this sense, in our country, some PPAs were involved in polemic situations when they obstructed the adhesion of professionals whose graduation course was not recognized by the PPA, but had been homologated by the Government (Lusa, 2005). We can say that behind a professional association there is always a candidate to a PPA (Moreira, 2003). In this sense, some Portuguese associations entitle themselves association pro-Order, like the Pro-Order Association of Psychologists (Associação Pró-Ordem dos Psicólogos) and the Teachers Pro-Order Trade Union (Associação Sindical dos Professores Pró-ordem). Professional associations can, with effect, also be understood as a strategy of a group to strengthen its status (Selander in Burrage and Torstendahl, 1990). Recently we have observed a substantial increase in the number of professional groups that obtain the status of a PPA following an apparently discretionary criterion by the legislator (Rego in Freire, 2004). For instance some professional groups succeeded to obtain the public status, like economists, while others, even if acting in more public interest sensitive fields, took longer, like psychologists or nutritionists. As a result of the proliferation of PPAs, Law 6/2008 was recently published to regulate its creation and action. The law has established a formal procedure for all PPAs creation but did not bring new features in terms of these associations power, namely on professional regulation. The only new requirement for the creation of a PPA is the making of a previous study, apparently an indicative of the importance of technical and scientific nature of the PPA creation. In short, we may expect that the material resources of professional groups will be important in order to support the legal initiative, besides the change of their lobbying focus, which will be centred on the parliamentary political parties instead of the government. The aim of this paper is to present and analyse the before and after periods of recently developed Portuguese legislation designed to regulate professional associations, taking in account policy makers standpoints, namely parliamentary parties who have voted and enacted the Law 6/2008. This paper is the result of an ongoing project on professional associations’ creation and it intends to discuss the impact of the new legal framework on the future strategies of professional groups.