Crafting Mass Partisanship at the Grass Roots, from the Top Down.

Cesar Zucco Rutgers University zucco@polisci.rutgers.edu David Samuels University of Minnesota dsamuels@umn.edu

This version: February 26, 2012

Abstract How does mass partisanship emerge? We explore the varying fates of parties in Brazila decidedly anti-party environment in which social-cleavages and historical legacies cannot explain the emergence of partisanshipand highlight a heretofore unexplored mechanism of crafting mass partisanship that sets the PT (Workers Party) apart from other parties: its deliberate eorts to reach out to organized elements in civil society by expanding its local-level organization. We show that the PT invested where civil society was organizationally dense, and that this led to increased party identication and improved electoral performance. Other parties, for path-dependent reasons, did not adopt this tacticand in the context of weak socio-cultural cleavages, have failed to gain partisan support.

Thanks to Oswaldo Amaral, Kosuke Imai, Rachel Meneguello, Andr Oliveira, Pedro Ribeiro, Taylor Boas, e Kathryn Hochstetler, and to sta at the IBGE (Juarez Silva Filho), CESOP (Rosilene Gelape), and Datafolha (Ana Cristina Cavalcanti de Souza).

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2002166

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How does mass partisanship developparticularly in the absence of deep socio-economic or cultural cleavages? In this paper we revisit one of the most venerable questions in comparative politics by examining variation in the evolution of mass partisanship in contemporary Brazil, focusing on the trajectory of the Brazilian Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT). The ability of a party to lay down deep roots in society, given Brazils social and institutional environment, represents a theoretical puzzle in its own right. This suggests that the study of the evolution of partisanship in Brazil oers a useful case for advancing the comparative study of the sources of cleavage-formation. According to the classic formulation of the social cleavage theory of party-system emergence and evolution, party systems reect deep historical societal divisions.1 This view highlights a bottom-up, grass-roots approach to the emergence of mass partisanship. Reecting theoretical dissatisfaction with this approach, other scholars have emphasized political rather than sociological factors in party-system emergence and evolution.2 This view focuses on the role of strategic politicians in crafting partisan attachments from the top-down. Brazil oers a compelling case for theory development. In comparative perspective, Brazil has below-average aggregate levels of mass partisanship.3 About 45 percent of Brazilians identify with one of the 19 parties that currently have at least one seat in its legislature. However, even this gure is somewhat misleading, as most parties remain weakly-sedimented in society.4 More specically, since 1989 (when surveys asking a partisanship question were rst taken) only three parties have ever commanded the sympathy of more than 5 percent of voters. In fact, as Figure 1 reveals, only one partythe PThas managed to capture a signicant number of partisans. Figure 1 shows the proportion of voters who identify with any party (the gray shaded area) as well as the share of Brazilians who have identied with the three largest parties: the PT, the PSDB (Party of the Brazilian Social Democracy), and the PMDB (Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement)5 [Figure 1 about here.]
2

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2002166

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The PT was granted legal recognition in 1982. By 1989 about 5 percent of Brazilians identied as petistas, but that proportion is now about 25 percent, corresponding to 60 percent of all partisan identiers in Brazil. Meanwhile, since 1989 the PMDBthe successor to the party that served as the sanctioned opposition under Brazils 1964-85 military regimehas steadily lost identiers, and the PSDBdespite holding the presidency from 19952002has never managed to attract more than a small number of partisans. Although candidates from these and other parties have had success at the polls, only the PT has captured the partisan loyalties of a sizable proportion of voters. The PTs growth from zero to one in four voters, over a relatively short period of time, is a remarkable achievement. How did the party grow from a footnote in Brazils party system in the early 1980s6 to dominant player todaywinning the last three presidential elections and laying down deep roots in Brazilian society? This question demands an answer. Unfortunately, existing research oers no solution to this puzzle, only providing clues as to what is not behind the rise of the PT and the stagnation of partisanship for Brazils other parties. The PTs rise becomes even more theoretically puzzling when we consider the fact that Brazil is, in comparative perspective, a theoretically unlikely case for mass partisanship to emerge. First, Samuels7 notes that ideology does not clearly dierentiate between identiers for Brazils main parties. Second, in contrast to several other new democracies in Latin America and Eastern Europe, parties have not organized along pro- and anti-old regime lines. Third, social cleavages such as class, ethnicity, religion, or region are comparatively shallow,8 and have historically never provided the basis for party competition. And nally, even if such cleavages existed, Brazils political institutions conspire against the emergence of mass partisanship.9 Its electoral rules permit high party-system fragmentation, making it hard for voters to understand where parties stand on the issues, and its open-list system for legislative elections fosters both intra- and inter-party competition, attenuating the importance of party labels and enhancing the importance of individual candidates reputations. In short, the institutional context and the absence of deep ideological or socio-cultural cleavages

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means that we lack an intuitive explanation for any observed elective anity between voters and partiesand also means that we have no simple explanation for variation on the dependent variable, the rise of partisanship for the PT and the stagnation of partisanship for its main rivals. Where does mass partisanship come from, if the institutional incentives perpetuate already-weak cultural and political cleavages? The usual alternative to the grass-roots explanation for the rise of mass partisanship focuses on strategic elites. However, the mechanism scholars typically point to driving this top-down process also cannot explain the PTs success and its rivals stagnation. Scholars have suggested that party elites try to forge partisanship by articulating a distinct ideological message and/or programmatic platform. Unfortunately this approach also leaves the puzzle unexplained, because the PTs partisan base grew even though its leaders deliberately toned down its leftist rhetoric, entered a confusing array of electoral coalitions with parties to its left and its right, and grew increasingly pragmatic in its approach to winning elections and governing.10 Parties that deliberately dilute their own message might gain votes, but we do not expect them to gain partisan identiers, particularly given the already-crowded center of Brazils party system. A clue towards explaining why the PT succeeded in capturing a large slice of partisans while its rivals failed to do so comes from Samuels,11 who suggested that petistas are activist-pragmatists, individuals who are particularly interested in and engaged in politics. At rst glance this still leaves unanswered the question of how the PT created so many partisans while other parties didnt, because political engagement in Brazil is highly correlated with partisanship for all parties. However, this suggestion does point to the crucial remaining distinction across Brazils major parties: a decision to invest or not in reaching out to organized civil society by building the partys local organization. We suggest that engaging civil society through party-building eorts can craft mass partisanship where none existed before. Variation in organizational investment strategies both explains variation across Brazilian parties in terms of levels of mass partisanship, and oers novel contributions to the

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comparative study of party and party-system evolution. Although the connection between party strategy and organized civil societyrather than latent socio-cultural cleavagesfor the emergence of partisanship does resonate with scattered work on parties in established European democracies, it has never been the focus of researchand no scholarship has ever provided direct evidence of the mechanism at work, partly because appropriate data are extremely dicult to nd. We provide such direct evidence, and for a dicult casewhere latent sociological cleavages are largely absent, something that hardly can be said for Western Europe. This suggests that the mechanism could be at work in both old and new democracies. In short, parties strategic development of local-level organization is a heretofore ignored topdown causal mechanism that can explain how political cleavages emerge. Whats more, as we explain below, this mechanism highlights that the bottom-up and top-down approaches to explaining mass partisanship are ip sides sides of the same coin: party elites must consciously invest in developing organizational links, but their eorts to transform vague sentiments into concrete political attachments will only bear fruit if the people they target are already actively organized in civil society, typically for reasons not directly related to partisan politics. In order to convincingly show this process at work, we privilege the relative precision in identifying a causal mechanism oered by high-quality data from one country, at the expense of broad comparisons. However, our argument is not tied to Brazil. We seek to emulate inuential case-specic comparative research on this topic12 in order to provide detailed insight into how a particular mechanism operates, in the hope that other work can identify similar processes elsewhere. The paper proceeds as follows. We rst develop the causal mechanism in our argument about the sources of mass partisanship, and explain how it relates to other explanations. Then we describe the origins and growth of Brazils parties, focusing in particular on why the PT chose one organizational path while other parties did not, and derive hypotheses to test our argument. Subsequently we empirically demonstrate that the PT has strategically expanded where we expect it to: where civil society organization is relatively denser. The nal two sections reveal the extent to

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which this strategy has paid o, signicantly increasing party identication and electoral support.

Top-Down and Bottom-up Party Building Strategies

Where do mass partisan cleavages come from? There are basically two views. The rst is the classic demand side social-cleavages approach originated by Lipset and Rokkan13 to explain the origin of parties and party systems in Western Europe. According to this view, a political cleavage is a lasting division between social groups that may give rise to open conict.14 This is a largely sociological view of parties, party systems, and mass partisanship, for it assumes that parties reect and represent pre-existing interests, which emerge from below. A second view pays greater attention to the supply side of politics. In this view, socio-cultural divides do not become partisan cleavages unless self-interested strategic party elites gure out how to politicize them. How do elites accomplish this? Politicians face two sets of challenges when attempting to craft partisanship: First they must rst create an appealing brand, and then they must disseminate it widely. In terms of creating a party brand, scholars have emphasized the importance of elites eorts to manipulate political rhetoric and symbols, in an eort to develop a coherent ideological or programmatic prole. Party leaders have incentives to strategically bundle a set of organizing principles and explanatory metaphors, in order to develop a convincing account for why a political problem exists and how to solve it. To achieve this goal, party elites craft political discourse, and develop coherent electoral platforms and policy proposals.15 A classic example is Przeworski and Spragues argument that an economic cleavage became important in Europe only insofar as leftist parties highlighted class issues.16 A second challengethe one into which we oer new insightis disseminating the partys brand. As Carmines and Stimson emphasize, most voters are fundamentally inertial and do not seek out party attachments if they do not already have one.17 The quandary scholars face is thus how to explain changea transition from an inertial state. Doing so requires insertion of a dynamic
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set of strategic actors into any causal story. Scholars who adopt a strategic elites approach have thus far implicitly or explicitly assumed that national party leaders are the key agents who create and disseminate partisan images, suggesting that leadership capacityeloquence, charisma, and tactical skillis key to explaining the spread of partisanship.18 Building on Carmines and Stimsons idea that party activists help explain issue evolution in American politics, our core claim is that top-down arguments should include a broader set of tactics party leaders can adopt to disseminate a party brand in their quest to craft mass partisanship. Specically, parties canand often docreate partisans by investing in developing their local-level organization and cultivating ties to active non-partisan civil society groups. That is, we agree that party elites can craft partisanship from above by presenting themselves as credible standard-bearers for certain groups or on particular issues. However, rhetoric coming from a partys national leaders may be insucient to generate partisan attachments. And even if broad preexisting latent forms of identity oer simple and easy symbolic coordination points around which a party can focus a national media or election campaign, party elites also have incentives to take their struggle down to the grass roots. The more that a party can engage closely and consistently with average citizens day-to-day concerns, in their communities, the more likely they are to come to identify deeply with that party. There is good reason to believe that investing in local party organization can plant seeds that will bloom even in a partisan desert. Such a strategy may succeed by making the partys brand personally relevant to citizens who are active in civil society but who are not particizedbut who might have an elective anity with the party doing the outreach. This strategy constitutes an eort to connect the party more closely with the issues and modes of political engagement that have already mobilized certain individuals. By bringing its its brand down to the grass roots, a party consistently highlights the dierences between itself and others, and demonstrates that it is more receptive to grass-roots concerns. In this way, opening a party branch may craft mass partisanship from abovebut at the grass roots.

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This argument clearly resonates with longstanding ndings from comparative parties research. Echoing Duvergers distinction between elite and mass parties, for example, scholars of Imperial Germany have long dierentiated between notables politics (Honoriatorenpolitik ) and mass politics (Massenpolitik ).19 Local politics in the former was dominated by self-appointed local elites, who only activated largely informal local-level organizations around election time and deactivated them immediately thereafter, relying largely on personal connections and/or clientelistic relations with voters. In contrast, mass parties developed strong, centralized organizationsbut also sought to develop a permanent and continuously active organizational presence at the local level. In Imperial Germany the Social Democrats (SPD) were the rst to try to leverage local organization as an electoral tool. Over time, other parties sought to emulate the SPDs observed successa phenomenon that Duverger called contagion from the left.20 It is important to recall that not all leftist parties adopted this organizational approach, and that many elite parties continued to rely on their traditional approachsome with more success than others. Some parties considered but never adopted this strategy. For example, the British Liberal Party in the period just after World War I considered and explicitly rejected expanding its local-level organizational presence, sticking instead with an organizational structure that resembled a decentralized federation. As a consequence, the party depended on the ad hoc personal and commercial relationships of local businessmen and other self-selected bourgeois notablesa tactic that ultimately failed in the face of competition from the better-organized Labour Party.21 Our argument also nds echo in research on recent party politics. Scholars have demonstrated, for example, that local-level organization helps parties recruit quality candidates22 and mobilize their own supporters.23 In addition, as the example of the Argentine Peronists suggests,24 by investing in local-level organization parties can perpetuate existing aective voter linkages, even if the party abandons its original policy stances. Such research assumes that local party organizations can add value where partisans already exist. To our knowledge, however, no researcheither on

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historical or contemporary party politicshas ever demonstrated that parties can leverage local organization to actually create partisan identities. The connection between party organization and organized civil society constitutes a missing link in existing theories of the emergence and evolution of mass partisanship. If we could go back in time and nd the appropriate data, it would be no surprise to nd that the European socialist parties that experienced the greatest success were not those that emerged where there were many blue collar workers, or even those that emerged where unions had organized those workers, but were those that had opened party branches where the unions were well-organized. We would expect a similar result for Christian Democratic partiespartisanship would be strongest not just where there were many Catholics, but where parties reached out to both churchgoers and lay groups that were well-integrated into local communities.25 Parties that create organizational links with already-mobilized elements in society should succeed at the pollsand in crafting partisan identities.

Organizational Strategies in Brazil

The case of Brazil is compelling for the top-down approach because preexisting socio-cultural and economic divides are comparatively absent. This gives us little reason to expect partisan identication to emerge naturally, without explicit crafting from above by self-interested politicians. Among Brazils parties, the PT oers an excellent example of how a party can successfully solve the twin challenges we described above. However, the PTs main rivals have never sought to develop a strong brand name, and have not emulated the PTs organizational-development strategy. This means we have considerable variation on our main independent variable within Brazil. In this section we rst consider the PTs solution to the branding challenge, discuss its strategic eort to disseminate its brand by reaching out to organized civil society through local party-building eorts, and then consider why its main rivals have never adopted a similar tactic.

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Branding: Samuels26 described how the PT developed and consolidated its party labela deliberate eort to set itself apart from Brazils other parties by developing a strong brand name. To limit individualism and promote the partys collective image, the PT threatened to expel elected ocials who bucked the party line after an internal voteand it followed through on this threat on several occasions. Unlike all other Brazilian parties, the PT also requires all elected ocials and political appointees to donate between 2 percent and 20 percent of their salary to the party (the percentage is determined on a sliding scale). These rules, as well as several others, dissuaded all but the most committed politicians from entering the PT, and clearly dierentiated it from other Brazilian parties, particularly its main competitors, the PMDB and PSDB. Given Brazils institutional context, the PT adopted this approach to bind individual politicians to the partyto guarantee to its heterogeneous base of support among social movements that it would remain a distinct actor over the long run. By enforcing group cohesion and promoting its label, the PT also created a political identity that could be easily marketed to a broad spectrum of individuals and groups.27 Although the PT has moderated its leftist discourse since the late 1990s,28 even after winning the presidency in 2002 its brand remains distinct from other parties. In particular, it has retained an emphasis on clean and participatory governance, and has consistently encouraged its candidates to weave these themes into local campaigns. Its distinctiveness today stems not from its leftism, but from its focus on radicalizing the process of democracy in Brazil, on promoting average citizens engagement in politics. Petistas today do not dier much from other Brazilians in terms of ideology,29 but they do dier in terms of their understanding of and engagement in politics. According to a 2006 survey30 (the only available recent survey that asks such questions)petistas dier from non-partisans in agreeing that democracy is the best form of government, politics is important to me, and participatory processes are important. In contrast, Brazilians who identify with the PMDB or the PSDB do not dier from non-partisans on these questions. In short, the PT created a brand early on, and its image has remained distinct. We now turn to the question of how the party

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cultivated new supporters as it grew.

Distribution:

The PT would not have had success in cultivating a mass partisan base without a

deliberate eort to expand its organizational reach. Since it was founded, it has not only sought to develop a strong central organization and enforce cohesive legislative behavior. Its self-advertised dierence was that it was a party of the workers. Although workers in the sense of organized labor constitute a relatively small proportion of Brazils population, the PT intended to signal that it could not be co-opted like other, older labor parties in Brazils historythat it was led by and served the interests of average Brazilians. This image aimed to distinguish the PT from other historical models of Brazilian party politics: the elite-led populist left and traditional centrist and conservative parties, which thrived on clientelistic connections to the state, as well as the vanguard revolutionary leftist parties that downplayed the importance of a large membership base. The PT sought to distinguish itself by cultivating and engaging a large and active membership base. Organizational consolidation at the center and the development of local party branch oces have both been part of this strategy. In particular, since the 1990s the PT has prioritized investing resources in expanding its organizational reach.31 For example, in 1995 the party armed at its National Meeting that it needed to increase its organizational capillarity by opening additional local branch oces. This eort explicitly sought to increase membership, improve the partys vote total, and cultivate deeper partisan attachments,32 goals that have been rearmed at all subsequent national meetings.33 The targets of the PTs outreach eorts have remained consistent over the years: Brazilians already engaged in social activism. To attract support in its early years, the PT explicitly drew upon a Gramscian notion of gaining hegemony in social movements,34 and cultivated connections to NGOs, labor unions, and Catholic lay activists.35 This connection between PT membership and social-movement activism has remained constant as new generations of petistas entered the party. In 2007, for example, the proportion of delegates at the PTs National Conference who were active in an NGO was about 80 percent. This proportion did not vary with delegates age, suggesting that
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the connection between activism and PT membership has remained constant over time, regardless of whether someone joined in 1980 or 2007.36 Although the PT has grown closer to the state as it won national power, it has not grown distant from organized civil society. Instead, civil society actors still see the PT as open to their demands, and willing to support their proposals.37 The PT brand remains potent, 30 years after its founding and long after the party had moderated its ideology. It has pursued a strategy of cultivating mass partisanship both when it was an insignicant opposition party as well as when it held Brazils presidency. Meneguello was perhaps the rst to note that the PT performed well where it had a solid organizational presence,38 and observational evidence certainly suggests that this connection persists: the PT elected city councilors in 47 percent of all municipalities in 2008, as compared against only 12 percent 20 years earlier.39 Furthermore, in terms of party ID, it seems obvious that this expansion eort has paid o, as mass partisanship for the PT has continued to grow. If the PTs strategy has paid o (a hypothesis we conrm below), has there been contagion from the PT in Brazil? The simple answer is no: Neither the PMDB nor the PSDBthe PTs main rivalshave adopted similar branding and organizational strategiesa fact that helps explain their inability to attract more partisan adherents. A powerful indicator of these parties strategic choices comes from the fact that after persistent inquiries with both parties national oces, we conrmed thatin contrast to the PTneither the PMDB nor the PSDB keep any records of the extent of their own local-level organizational presence. Quite simply, a party cannot act strategically to expand its local presence if it has no information about where it exists and where it does not. Of course, this begs the question of why these parties pursued dierent tactics. The answer lies partly with the path-dependent eects of organizational culture.40 The PMDB is the successor to the sanctioned opposition party under Brazils 196485 military regime. However, subsequent events revealed this connection between the PMDB and anti-regime activism to be circumstantial and ephemeral. With the return to democracy the one thing that united the PMDB disappeared, and the party degenerated into a federation of state-level electoral machines,

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dominated by politicians who cultivate clientelistic relationships with voters.41 The PMDB does have an extensive paper organizational presence, but it follows the elite party model in that its actual local-level organizational presence ebbs and ows with the electoral calendar. Its links to organized civil society are also relatively few, and weakand as a result the party lacks a clear brand name. Given this organizational weakness and failure to develop a coherent brand, mass identication with the PMDB has declined as time weakens the memory of the partys origins under the dictatorship. The PMDB has had this prole since the early 1980s. Although it has lost partisan identiers, it remains one of Brazils most competitive parties due to the persistence of electoral clientelism across much of Brazil. This provides few incentives for party elites to change their tactics and emulate the PT. As for the PSDB, its meteoric electoral success generated powerful disincentives to invest in organizational development.42 The PSDB emerged as a breakaway faction from within the PMDB, in 1988and by 1994 it was in control of the federal government. It was born a resource-rich party, dominated by experienced oce-holders from the state of So Paulo, Brazils largest and wealthiest. a Yet despite winning the 1994 and 1998 presidential elections, the PSDB has never superseded its regional nature, and it has made no eort to emulate the PTs organizational strategy. Upon its formation it adopted a structure similar to its parent party, and to this day it remains a loose association of professional politicians, with a relatively weak local presence and relatively few active rank-and-le members.43 Like the PMDB, the PSDB remains a powerful political player because of the popularity and experience of its leaders rather than because it has developed a coherent vision for Brazil or because it has cultivated connections to elements of organized civil societya fact acknowledged by its leader Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazils president from 19952002.44 In interesting ways the PSDB resembles the British Liberal Party in the early 20th century, in that it eschewed cultivating ties to civil society, instead believing that its leaders image as ecient and eective would continue to carry the party to victory.45 In Brazil, only the PT has deliberately chosen to engage organized civil society. The other main

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parties have chosen fundamentally dierent tactics to achieve electoral successclientelism in the case of the PMDB, and a general appeal to liberal principles of leadership quality, eciency and clean government in the case of the PSDB. These tactics, we suggest, help explain the variation observed in Figure 1. Neither the PMDB nor the PSDB have focused on crafting mass partisanship from above or from below, while the PT has. As such, they may win elections, but they do not develop mass partisanship. In the next sections we test our main claim that the PT has engaged in strategic organizational outreach eorts, and these eorts explain the growth of mass partisanship for the PT. Specically, if our argument about the sources of mass partisanship is true, we expect the following: First, that the PT will expand where organized civil society is denser, a hypothesis we test in the next section. Second, that the PT will reap benets from this strategy, in the form of increased party identication and increased vote for the party in legislative elections.

Determinants of Party Expansion

We expect the PT to expand organizationally in places where there existed organized civil society. In this section we examine the association between the density of civil society and patterns of PT expansion. To test our causal claim about the determinants of party organization, we exploit the fact that the party has been continuously expanding geographically, establishing itself in new municipalities over time. More specically, we derive inferences via counterfactual logic, contrasting municipalities in which the PT established itself after 2001 with those in which the party could have established a presence, but did not. We use 2001 as the reference point because this is the rst year for which systematic data on PT local presence are available. This provides a conservative test of our argument, for two reasons. First, by 2001, the PT was already present in about half of Brazils approximately 5500 municipalitiesmostly the larger and wealthier ones. That is, the PT had already established
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itself where it was relatively easy to do so. Second, after 2002 the PT was the incumbent party at national level, giving it far more wealth and power than in its early years. In such a situation, the party had relatively weaker incentives to deepen its ties to civil society. If we can demonstrate that the PT continued its organizational expansion after 2001and can then demonstrate that this strategy continued to pay owe will have provided strong evidence in favor of our main argument that the party strategically crafted partisanship from above, at the grass roots.

Data and Methods:

In this section we exploit an extremely rare form of data on party or-

ganization. Since 2001, the PTs national headquarters has kept detailed and accurate records of local-level organizational presence across Brazil. For each municipality, these records describe whether a legally-recognized party branch oce exists or not, andif a branch existsthe number of eligible and voting members in the partys internal primaries, called the Processo de Eleies co Diretas (PED), also for each municipality.46 Our dependent variable is dichotomouswhether or not the PT established a local presence between 2001 and 2009. We rst discarded all municipalities in which the PT was already present in 2001, with presence dened as whether at least one PT member voted in the partys 2001 PED. We then dened the PT as having established itself or not depending on whether at least one member voted in the 2009 PED. Established was coded as a 1, while municipalities in which the PT continued to have no presence were coded as 0. Using these criteria, in 2001 the PT had no presence in 2958 of Brazils 5564 municipalities. By 2009 it had opened a branch in 1894 of these. Using PED data is conceptually superior to simply counting whether a party has a legallyregistered local branch oce, because we want to measure the partys eective presence. Holding a PED is a higher threshold than simply registering a local branch with the national electoral court or having members on the partys books who do not even bother to vote in a PED. We also chose to code party presence as a dummy because what matters conceptually is the dierence between having no presence and having some presence. Parties cannot open multiple branches in the same municipality, but opening a local branch should provide a jolt to local-level mobilization
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eorts.47 The main independent variable in this part of our analysis is another rare form of data, on local-level civil society density. We derived this indicator from a census of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) published in 2002 by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geograa e Estat stica (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, IBGE).48 These are actual counts of legallyregistered NGOs in every municipality in Brazil, and also include the number of people employed in each of 14 categories of NGOs in each municipality. We dropped organizations in two of these categories: notary publics and condominium resident associations, which were unrelated to our concept of civil society.49 As with party presence, we are interested in the impact of actual civil society activity, and not merely its paper presence. NGOs can exist legally but not have much of an eective presence. Yet if an NGO actually employs people, we have better reason to believe that it performs some real work. As such, we measure civil society density as the (log of the) number of people employed in qualifying NGOs per 1000 residents in each municipality. It is true that many NGOs rely on volunteers, something our more stringent measure does not capture. However, our operationalization of civil society density should pick up the eect of voluntary mobilization, which is likely to be highly correlated with the presence of NGOs that have employees paid to mobilize volunteers. As an initial test we estimated the association between civil society density and the probability that the PT opened a branch with a logit regression, in which we controlled for several possible confounding variables. These include municipal population, whether the states governor belonged to the PT (a dummy), and the municipalitys distance from the state capital in kilometers, which controls for the fact that parties and NGOs are more likely to establish themselves in state capitals rst and expand from there. We also controlled for socio-economic factors using the municipal human development index (HDI-M), computed for the year 2000 by the IBGE and United Nations Development Program. The HDI-M is a composite indicator of per capita income, years of education, and life expectancy measured for each municipality. This controls for the likelihood that

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the less-developed a municipality, the less likely are parties and NGOs to have a presence, all else equal.50 The greatest obstacle to a causal interpretation of our results is that municipalities are not randomly assigned dierent levels of civil society density. Hence, our indicator of civil society density could be capturing other unobserved dierences that exist between municipalities. To gain condence in our ndings, we also analyzed the data using a generalized propensity score (GPS) matching approach51 a matching procedure that can be employed when the causal variable of interest is continuous.52 This involves a two-step estimation process. We rst estimated a regression in which we predicted the treatment variablecivil society densitywith a set of pre-treatment covariates that included municipal population, HDI-M, distance to the state capital, squared and cubic terms of these three variables, dummies for each of Brazils regions, and the PTs performance in the previous legislative election. The predicted values of this regression are the propensity scores. As per Imai and van Dyk,53 we partitioned the full sample into ten strata of similar municipalities based on their propensity scores, and estimated a logit regression for each stratum in which opening a party branch is the dependent variable and actual civil society density is the main independent variable, controlling for the propensity score, region, and the PTs prior performance in legislative elections. The treatment eect is the average of the eect across strata.

Results

Table 1 reports partial results of our logit model using the full sample and after match-

ing.54 To ease interpretation of results we exclude control variables from presentation, and report only rst dierences for our causal variable of interest plus the baseline result. Results for civil society density are both statistically signicant and substantively important in both models. A change in from the 25th to the 75th percentile on our scale of civil society density increases the probability that the PT would open a branch by 0.075, a 12 percent increase over the baseline.55

[Table 1 about here.]

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The magnitude of the eects after matching are very similar, and remain statistically signicant in two otherwise similar municipalities, moving from the 25th to 75th percentile in of civil society density increases the probability of the PT opening a branch by 0.075, a 13 percent increase. Overall, both models provide solid evidence supporting our hypothesis that the PT sought to expand where it had the most promising connectionswhere civil society was relatively better-organized. This signicant eect of civil society on the probability of opening a branch after we matched municipalities on the PTs past electoral performance and controlled for performance at the start of the period of interest suggests that civil society density has a direct eect on the partys decision to open a branch. But does the PT actually benet from setting up shop? Can we tell, for instance, whether any observed improved electoral performance is simply an eect of pro-PT conditions in the municipality that also lead to opening a branch? In the next two sections we adopt a dierent empirical strategy to answer these questions, and demonstrate that the PTs partisanship and vote totals grow after the party opens a local branch.

Party Organization and Party Identication

Having conrmed that the PT strategically expanded its organizational presence where organized civil society was denser, we now must examine the extent to which this strategy paid o. In this section we explore the hypothesis that the PTs local-level organizational expansion strengthens its ties with voters, which should be reected in higher levels of party identication.

Data & Methods:

We seek to assess the growth in partisan identication for the PT in mu-

nicipalities where it established itself relative to municipalities where it never established a local organizational presence. The causal connection between local organization and party identication is theoretically relatively straightforward, but there are many challenges in empirically evaluating this link. As noted above, we possess indicators of the PTs municipal-level organizational presence since 2001. Unfortunately, no comparable measure of the extent of party identication among all

18

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voters at the municipal level exists for all municipalities across Brazil. To get around this problem, we combine data from dierent nationally-representative surveys to estimate partisanship levels under dierent conditions. Each survey we used asked respondents the same question about whether they identied with a particular political party, and each survey also identied the municipality in which the respondent was interviewed. Unfortunately, only those surveys elded after March 2002 identify respondents municipality, which restricts our analysis of the eects of opening a branch on party identication to the 20062010 electoral cycle.56 Each municipality falls into one of four conditions depending on whether the PT was present (held a PED in which at least one member voted) at the start and at the end of a time-period or not. We labeled as never the condition where the party did not have a presence in 2005 and did not establish a presence by 2009. Always refers to municipalities where the party had a presence at the start and kept it until the end. In turn, closed designates municipalities where the party had a branch at the start but was absent at the end, and opened applies to municipalities where the party did not have a presence at the start but did so by the end. Figure 2 reports levels of party identication by each condition. These values were obtained by pooling surveys taken around 2005 (t0 ) and 2009 (t1 ). Clearly, identication with the PT increases relatively more in municipalities where it opened a branch (dashed line) than in any of the other three categories. This gure provides preliminary evidence supporting our hypothesis. [Figure 2 about here.] The increase shown in the dashed line in Figure 2 has to be assessed against a baseline. Municipalities where the PT never established itself provide the best counterfactual to what would have happened in the municipalities where the party did open a branch, had it not done so. Hence, our comparison of interest is between the never and opened conditions. The denition of causal eect we employ, and the estimates we report in the remainder of this paper, rest on this comparison. We implemented a standard dierences-in-dierences (DiD) design to determine whether the
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changes in levels of party ID from the start to end of the cycle in the treatment groupwhere the PT opened a branchdier signicantly from any changes in the baseline control groupwhere it did not open a branchover the same period. We stress, at this point, that although we use the language of experimental studies the treatment is clearly not as if randomly dispensed.57 Yet by combining both before-and-after and cross-sectional contrasts, we add a within-subjects element to our analysis that can strengthen the causal interpretation of our results.58 More importantly, we undertake robustness checks, below, which move us closer to a quasi-experimental setup, putting us on rmer grounds for causal inference. The DiD analysis is very simple: we regress an indicator of party identicationcoded as 1 if individual i in municipality j at time t identies with the PTon two dummy variables and their interaction. The rst dummy indicates which period the observation corresponds to, and is coded as zero if it is from t0 and 1 if the observation is from t1 . The second dummy is an indicator of the treatment, coded as 1 if the PT opened a branch in that municipality during the election cycle (opened), and zero if it did not (never). The coecient on the interaction term is therefore the estimate of the causal eect of opening a branch in a treated municipality at t1 . We estimated treatment eects using linear probability models. Since the independent variables are dummies that dene subgroups of observations, the coecients are the mean values of the dependent variables in each such subgroup. In our case, the dependent variable is a dichotomous indicator of identication with the PT, so coecients can be directly interpreted as proportions of voters in the subgroups dened by the dummies. A linear probability model is appropriate even though our dependent variable is dichotomous because the two dummies and their interaction dene all possible subgroups in the datai.e. the model is saturated.59 Although our designwith one pre-treatment and one post-treatment observationis quite simple, the hierarchical nature of our data does deserve some attention and statistical adjustments. By pooling responses from dierent surveys in 2005 and 2009, we obtain 35,539 individual-level observations. This is not a panel of individuals, as each respondent is sampled only once. More

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importantly, because the treatment (opening a PT branch) is dispensed at the level of municipalities, we are actually using individual-level observations to estimate the proportion of respondents in municipality in each condition who identify with the PT during each period (t0 and t1 ). That is, we can directly observe whether individuals identify with the party or not, but we cannot observe whether any particular person becomes a petista. Instead, we can estimate the eect of opening a branch by comparing the proportion of individuals who identify with the PT in municipalities in the control group against the corresponding proportion of individuals in municipalities in the treatment group. This means that we only use the relatively smaller share of individuals who were sampled in municipalities in the never and open conditions. In short, what we are doing is contrasting municipalities (and not individuals) in dierent conditions. We adjusted for this hierarchical structure of our data in two ways: rst, by clustering standard errors by municipality (which accounts for the fact that individuals are not independent observations but are clustered in municipalities); and second, by employing a random-eects model (which allows treatment eects to vary across municipalities). We also estimate a third model, demonstrating that our results hold up when individual-level controls are also included. In this last variation, instead of a linear probability model we estimated a logit with random eects, because the model is no longer saturated.

Results:

Table 2 reports treatment eects and the baseline levels of party identication for these

three models. For the two linear probability models, we report the the intercept and the coecient on the interaction term, which can be directly interpreted as the baseline proportion and treatment eect, respectively. In the logit model we report the predicted baseline probability and marginal eects of the treatment for an average individual in an average municipality. All estimates are similar. Overall, the share of respondents in a municipality who identify with the PT grew considerably more where it established a branch relative to where it did not. The growth is almost 10 percent, which represents a dramatic jump given that the baseline levels of partisanship at the start of the time-period were under 14 percent. In the logit model the in21

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clusion of controls picks up some of the variance, which leads to narrower standard errors. The marginal eects of treatment, however, are almost identical to the average treatment eects estimated through the linear models. These results provide strong support for our main hypothesis: that the PTs strategy of attempting to strategy craft mass partisanship at the grass roots pays o handsomelyeven outside of large and wealthy urban areas, where the party has its historical roots.

[Table 2 about here.]

Party Organization and Electoral Performance

Our results support the contention that parties can strategically craft partisanship from the topdown, by reaching out to organized civil society. However, we recognize that measuring party ID with survey data imposes restrictions on our analysis. For this reason, we wish to provide additional evidence that the PTs strategy pays o. That is, if the logic of our argument is correct, then the PTs strategy should not only craft mass partisanship, it should also improve the partys vote total in legislative elections. Electoral performance, however, uctuates from election to election for reasons having nothing to do with organizational expansion. We again deal with this challenge with a DiD design. In contrast to the preceding analysis, however, here we observe the treatment and outcome variables at the same levelthe municipality. This considerably simplies the analysis and allows us to examine two electoral cycles. In addition, the availability of more and higherquality data allows us to perform robustness checks that increase our condence in the link between local organization and party performance.

Data & Methods:

The dependent variable here is the PTs share of votes for candidates and the

party label in lower-chamber national legislative elections, measured at the level of the municipality. Brazil has an open-list proportional representation system in which the countrys 27 states function as constituencies of varying district magnitude. Voters have one vote, and can choose individual
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candidates or the party label. Figure 3 echoes Figure 2, providing the PTs average vote share in municipalities in each condition at the start and at the end of each electoral cycle. In both periods the party increased its vote share relatively more in municipalities where it opened a branch (the dashed line) than in any of the other three categories. In the 20022006 cycle this contrast is particularly striking, as the PTs performance was negative or at in all categories except where it established itself. In the 20062010 cycle the party improved its performance in all types of municipalities, but the improvement was most pronounced where it established a local presence. As with our analysis of party ID above, these gures again provide prima facie evidence supporting our hypothesis.

[Figure 3 about here.]

To conrm this relationship, we estimated a model for each election cycle that explores changes in proportions. This approach echoes what we did in the previous section, although the hierarchical structure of the data is now absent and the outcome variable in each cycle is now continuous, representing the PT vote share observed at the beginning and the end of each cycle. Once again the dependent variable (vote share) is regressed on a dummy indicating the period of the observation, a dummy indicating whether the municipality was in the treatment condition (open), and an interaction between these two dummies. The interaction is the estimate of the treatment eect. To simplify presentation of results, we focus on this last coecient and the baseline vote share in the control group at the start of the cycle, so that the substantive magnitude of the treatment eect can be assessed.

Results:

We report estimates from saturated linear probability models as well as a placebo

test, which we discuss below. (We also estimated a logit with controls, but do not report those results. Results were highly similar, and are available from the authors.) Results in Table 3 reveal that in both cycles the PT performs signicantly better in municipalities where it establishes a branch prior to the election. The estimate is statistically signicant, and amounts to a 1.5 and 2.0
23

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percentage point increase in the partys vote share in each cycle relative to the partys performance in the control group. Given that the PT obtained just under 8 percent of the votes on average in municipalities in the control group at the start of each cycle, opening a branch has a substantively large eect, increasing the PTs vote share by roughly 18 to 27 percent compared to its baseline vote share, in both years.

[Table 3 about here.]

Robustness Checks:

Do these results really indicate a causal association between local presence

and electoral performance? The crucial identication assumption in a DiD design is that the counterfactual trend would be the same in both treated and untreated observations. In our case, this means that the model assumes that in the absence of opening a branch, the average change on the dependent variable would be the same in both the treatment and control groups. The main threat to this assumption is that the decision to open a municipal-level party branch is potentially endogenous to certain municipal-level characteristicsmost obviously, NGO density and past party performance. And if these same characteristics also aect the partys subsequent electoral performance, our causal inference will be awed. We approached this problem in two ways, and rule outor at least minimizethe chance that we are observing a spurious association. First, we conducted a placebo test for the results from the rst cycle. This involves re-estimating the DiD model using the subsequent periods treatment indicator. Party organization cannot logically have an eect on subsequent vote performance prior to being established. However, the same municipal characteristics that might lead to the opening of a party branch in the rst cycle could also lead to opening a branch in the second cycle. It is here that our research design most approaches a proper quasi-experiment,60 in that municipalities in which the PT established itself in the rst cycle are likely to be similar to those in which the party eventually establishes itself in the second. Opening a branch in the future is thus a perfect placebo for estimating whether some omitted determinant of opening a branch in the present (rather than the observable fact of

24

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actually opening a branch) is driving the PTs improved performance. If results reported above were simply capturing the eect of unobserved municipal characteristics on PT performance rather than actually capturing the eects of the PTs organizational presencethe placebo should yield results similar to those of the actual treatment. However, results on the placebo in Table 3 show that its eect was small and statistically insignicant. This suggests that establishing an organizational presence does have an independent causal impact on vote share. Our second robustness check relies on a matching procedure. Although DiD is typically used in natural experiment settings where treatments are rarely (if ever) truly randomly assigned, scholars usually assume that the treatment is exogenously assigned to units by processes unrelated to the treatment itself. Exogeneity is often debatable, but it is clearly not present in our case. As discussed above, civil society density predicts where the PT will open a branch. And although evidence thus far suggests that opening a branch boosts the PTs electoral performance, the true cause of improved electoral performance could be higher civil society density rather than setting up a branch. Our placebo test suggests that this is not the case, but does not explicitly control for this possibility. To address this possibility, we matched treated and untreated municipalities on pre-treatment observables, particularly NGO density and past electoral performance. We required exact matches on region and on coarsened versions of PTs electoral performance in the previous presidential and legislative elections.61 In addition, we performed nearest-neighbor matches on population size, electoral performance two elections earlier, HDI-M, distance to capital city, and on the original (continuous) values of the coarsened variables mentioned above. Matching was done for each period separately, and the resulting balance between treatment and control groups in each cycle was very good (See the supplemental materials for more information). The stringent requirements of exact matches on several variables means that we are comparing pairs of municipalities that resemble each other in nearly every respectexcept for the crucial variable of whether or not the PT opened a party branch. Table 4 reports the DiD estimates.

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For the rst election cycle, nominal eects are slightly larger than those obtained with the complete (unmatched) data set. Estimates for the cycle ending in 2010, on the other hand, are considerably larger than those reported earlier. In short, our best estimates, after conducting a stringent matching procedurewhich comes as close as possible using observational data to eliminating potential endogeneity eectsprovide solid support for our causal claim, that the PTs strategy of organizing where civil society is relatively denser pays o in terms of votes for the partys legislative candidates.62 [Table 4 about here.]

Discussion & Conclusion

The emerging partisan cleavage in contemporary Brazil has been fundamentally crafted from the top downin particular, by the PTs strategic eorts to consolidate support at the mass level by engaging organized civil society. The PT is the only Brazilian party to have undertaken such eorts, and the result is a party system in which most people who identify with any party identify with the PT. The PT has always had a selfimage as a party of activist citizens, Brazilians who want to engage in politics to help change politics and society. Since the 1980s it has sought to develop and consolidate this brand. Its success, however, is due to more than creation of a brand. The PT also engaged in a deliberate eort disseminate its brand through an organizational development strategy that aimed to cultivate the partys connection to individuals in organized civil society. PT leaders focused their eorts where they believed this strategy would generate the highest returns: where civil society was relatively well-organized. Such an eort t with the PTs roots, and demonstrates the extent to which the party and its label still resonate with activist Brazilians. Over the last 30 years, the partys eorts helped it cultivate fruit in a desertwhere partisan identities were thin on the groundand improved its performance in legislative elections. Importantly, the PT pursued this strategy both when it was in opposition and when it controlled the government,
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suggesting that creation and dissemination of a brand name are not tools exclusive to small, resource-poor opposition partiesthey can be part of a political strategy for consolidating power over the long term. Our argument seeks to emulate other research that focuses on one particular instance or case to oer theoretical insights into important and broad comparative politics questionsin this case the origins of mass partisanship.63 The strength of our argument lies with extending the conceptual range of the strategies parties can adopt to craft mass partisanship, and by carefully documenting the causal impact of this mechanism. Specically, although many scholars have highlighted the autonomy of politics in the process of cleavage-formation, such research has focused on elites national rhetorical, electoral and policymaking eorts.64 We suggest that party elites have at least one other tool in their kit to help instantiate their brand at the mass level: opening party branch oces, in an eort to reach out to like-minded individuals active in organized civil society. This causal impact of this tactic follows the same logic as that articulated by Torcal and Mainwaring: by developing local organization, parties reach out and personally engage individuals and groups in political experiences that directly forge collective memories and identities (ibid.). Local party organization is a missing link between top-down supply side and bottom-up demand side arguments about the origins of partisanship and party systems. As such, the strong evidence that such a tactic works in practice carries broad comparative implications both for understanding party-system development in historical perspective and for understanding contemporary party-system evolution. Our ndings suggest that parties can supply their product their brand nameand reap prot in votes and partisan support if they reach out not merely to a set of individuals, but to individuals who are already enmeshed in activist social networks. This strategy is not newbut to our knowledge, partly due to the diculty of nding reliable data on civil-society density and on local-level party organization, this paper oers the rst demonstration of the tactics eectiveness in practice. As noted, the PTs strategy resembles the

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tactic many Socialist and Christian Democratic parties pursued long ago. In established Western European democracies, parties on both the left and the right sought to connect not just to to like-minded individuals, but to individuals who were already enmeshed in mobilized social networks. Likewise, the decision of the PTs rivals not to pursue a similar strategy echoes the choices other parties have made, in dierent countries and in dierent historical eras. Overall, the contrast between the tactics Brazils parties chose echoes decades-old discussions of the extent to which we observe organizational contagion from the left. This extensive literature suggests that there is no necessary reason why parties in other countries today could not pursue a strategy similar to the PTs. Parties can lay down rootscrafting partisan identities from aboveby linking up with organized civil society. It is true that such a party-building strategy demands institutional innovation, but the fact that the PT built its brand name in a country with anti-party electoral institutions and weak socio-cultural cleavages suggests, at a minimum, that parties elsewhere (or even in Brazil!) could pursue a similar approach. Around the world, many politicians rely on clientelistic access to government resources. Others, in turn, focus on their personal charisma and leadership qualities. Both of these strategies generate elite-run electoral machines, with relatively weak party organization, minimal ties to organized civil society, and tenuous partisan identication among voters. This model is Duvergers classic elite party, and it remains prevalent across new democracies in particular.65 However, many parties may nd the tactic of reaching out to elements in civil society a protable strategy. Future scholarship should investigate further the conditions under which and ways that parties and civil society interact to form partisan cleavages.

Notes
1

Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan. Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives. New

York: The Free Press, 1967.

2

Giovanni Sartori. Politics, Ideology, and Belief Systems. In: The American Political Science Review 63.2 (1969), Adam Przeworski and John D. Sprague. Paper stones: A history of electoral socialism. Chicago:

pp. 398411;

28

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University of Chicago Press, 1986; Mariano Torcal and Scott Mainwaring. The Political Re-crafting of Social Bases of Party Competition: The Case of Chile 1973-1995. In: British Journal of Political Science 33.1 (2003), pp. 5584.
3

John Huber, Georgia Kernell, and Eduardo Leoni. Institutional Context, Cognitive Resources, and Party At-

tachments Across Democracies. In: Political Analysis 13.4 (2005), pp. 36586.
4

Herbert Kitschelt et al. Latin American Party Systems. Cambrige: Cambridge, 2010. Data are from surveys conducted by Datafolha, one of Brazils largest polling companies, which since 1989 has

routinely asked voters the open-ended question Which is your preferred political party? A collection of these surveys are available from UNICAMPs Center for the Study of Public Opinion (CESOP).
6

Rachel Meneguello. PT: A formao de um partido, 1979-1982. So Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1989; Margaret Keck. ca a

The Workers Party and democratization in Brazil. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
7

David Samuels. Sources of Mass Partisanship in Brazil. In: Latin American Politics and Society 48.2 (2006),

pp. 127.
8

Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully. Building Democratic Instituions: Party System in Latin America. Stan-

ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

9

e.g. Scott Mainwaring. Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization. Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1999; David Samuels. Incentives to Cultivate a Party Vote in Candidate-centric Electoral Systems: Evidence from Brazil. In: Comparative Political Studies 32.4 (1999), pp. 487518; Barry Ames. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
10

Wendy Hunter. The Normalization of an Anomaly: The Workers Party in Brazil. In: World Politics 59.3

(2007), pp. 440475.

11

Samuels, Sources of Mass Partisanship in Brazil, see n. 7. Pradeep Chhibber and Mariano Tocal. Elite Strategy, Social Cleavages, and Party Systems in a New Democracy

12

Spain. In: Comparative Political Studies 30.1 (1997), pp. 2754; Torcal and Mainwaring, see n. 2; Margit Tavits. Party Organizational Strength and Electoral Performance in Post-Communist Europ. In: Journal of Politics 74.1 (2012).
13

Lipset and Rokkan, see n. 1. Torcal and Mainwaring, see n. 2, p. 57. Torcal and Mainwaring, see n. 2, p.59. Przeworski and Sprague, see n. 2. Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson. Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics.

14

15

16

17

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

18

James L. Sundquist. Dynamics of the party system: alignment and realignment of political parties in the United

29

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States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1983, p.43.
19

February 26, 2012

See e.g. Jonathan Sperber. The Kaisers Voters. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Margaret Ander-

son. Practicing democracy: Elections and political culture in Imperial Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
20

Maurice Duverger. Political Parties. New York: Wiley, 1954, p. xxvii. Ross McKibbin. The ideologies of class: social relations in Britain, 1880-1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

21

1990. isbn: 9780198221609, p. 90.

22

John P. Frendreis, James L. Gibson, and Laura L. Vertz. The Electoral Relevance of Local Party Organizations.

In: American Political Science Review 84.1 (1990), pp. 225235.

23

Paul F. Whiteley et al. Explaining Party Activism: The Case of the British Conservative Party. In: British

Journal of Political Science 24.1 (1994), pp. 7994; P. Whiteley and P. Seyd. How to win a landslide by really trying: the eects of local campaigning on voting in the 1997 British general election. In: Electoral Studies 22.2 (2003), pp. 301324.
24

Steven Levitsky. Transforming labor-based parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in comparative perspec-

tive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

25

Stathis Kalyvas. The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Samuels, Incentives to Cultivate a Party Vote in Candidate-centric Electoral Systems: Evidence from Brazil,

26

see n. 9.
27

Samuels, Incentives to Cultivate a Party Vote in Candidate-centric Electoral Systems: Evidence from Brazil,

see n. 9, p. 511.
28

Wendy Hunter. The Transformation of the Workers Party in Brazil, 1989-2009. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 2010; Daniela Campello. Whats Left of the Brazilian Left? Unpublished Manuscript, Princeton Unviersity. 2012; Timothy Power and Cesar Zucco. Elite Preferences in a Consolidating Democracy: The Brazilian Legislative Surveys, 1990-2009. Unpublished Manuscript, Oxford Univeristy. 2011.
29

Samuels, Sources of Mass Partisanship in Brazil, see n. 7. Fundaao Perseu Abramo. Cultura Pol c tica BRASIL06.MAR-02483. Interviewed 2379 people between on

30

March 10-16, 2006. In: Banco de Dados do Centro de Estudos de Opinio Pblica. http://www.cesop.unicamp.b a u r/site/htm/busca/php, accessed on 09/01/2008: CESOP-UNICAMP, 2006.
31

Pedro Ribeiro. Dos sindicatos ao governo: a organizaao nacional do PT de 1980 a 2005. So Paulo: UFSc a

Car/FAPESP, 2010, p. 245; Oswaldo Amaral. As Transformaoes na Organizao Interna do Partido dos Trabalc ca hadores Entre 1995 e 2009. Ph.D. Thesis. Campinas: Unicamp, 2010, p. 73; Celso Roma. Organizaciones De Partido En Brasil: El PT y el PSDB Bajo Perspectiva Comparada. In: Amrica Latina Hoy 44 (2006), pp. 153184. e

30

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32

February 26, 2012

Partido dos Trabalhadores. Resolues de encontros e congressos: 1979-1998. So Paulo, 1998, p. 637. co a Ribeiro, Dos sindicatos ao governo: a organizaao nacional do PT de 1980 a 2005, see n. 31, p. 245; Partido dos c

33

Trabalhadores. Resulues do 3o Congresso do Partido dos Trabalhadores. Porto Alegre: PT, 2007, p. 104. co
34

Pedro Ribeiro. Changing for Victory (and Government): Understanding the Transformation of the Workers

Party via an Organizational Approach (1980-2010). Presented at the Workshop The PT from Lula to Dilma, Oxford University. 2012, p. 16.
35

Meneguello, see n. 6; Keck, see n. 6. Amaral, see n. 31, p.99. Amaral, see n. 31, p.218. Meneguello, see n. 6. Fundaao Perseu Abramo. Eleioes: PT cresce e vence 559 prefeituras. Teoria e Debate n. 79. 2009. c c Angelo Panebianco. Organization and Power. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Frances Hagopian. Traditional politics and regime change in Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Roma, Organizaciones De Partido En Brasil: El PT y el PSDB Bajo Perspectiva Comparada, see n. 31. Daniel Bramatti and Julia Dualibbi. Filiados tucanos desconhecem partido. In: Estado de So Paulo (Jan 29, a

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

2012), A12; Celso Roma. A Institucionalizaao Do PSDB Entre 1988 E 1999. In: Revista Brasileira De Cincias c e Sociais 17.49 (2002), pp. 7192, p. 79.
44

Fernando Henrique Cardoso. O Papel da Oposiao. In: Interesse Nacional 4.13 (2011), pp. 1019. c McKibbin, see n. 21. Partido dos Trabalhadores. Dados Ociais do PED. Excell Spreadsheet. 2011. We explored continuous denitions of party presence, but found that although signicant dierences exist between

45

46

47

no presence and some presence, dierent levels of presence were indistinguishable from each other. Results are available from the authors.
48

IBGEInstituto Brasileiro de Geograa e Estat stica. As Fundaoes Privadas e Associaes sem Fins Lucrativos c co

no Brasil, 2002. Estudos E Pesquisas: Informacao Econmica 4. Rio de Janeiro, 2004. o

49

See the supplemental materials for more information on these data. All of our control variables are publicly available online from the Brazilian Institute of Applied Economic Research

50

(IPEA), the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), or the IBGE.

51

Kosuke Imai and David van Dyk. Causal Inference With General Treatment Regimes: Generalizing the Propen-

sity Score. In: Journal of the American Statistical Association 99.467 (2004), pp. 854866.
52

Matching is not a perfect substitute for random assignment of the causal variable of interest, because it cannot

rule out the existence of associations between the treatment variable and unobserved variables. Nevertheless,

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balancing the data set before estimating the regression takes us a step closer to the experimental idealcomparing units that vary on some treatment variable only against others that are very similar in every observed respect.
53

Imai and van Dyk, see n. 51. For a discussion of the balance achieved after matching, see the supplemental materials. Some control variables are also signicant predictors of opening a branch. See supplemental materials for details. Details about the surveys used can be found in the supplemental materials. Thad Dunning. Improving Causal Inference. In: Political Research Quarterly 61.2 (2008), pp. 282293. Gregory Robinson, John E. McNulty, and Jonathan S. Krasno. Observing the Counterfactual? The Search for

54

55

56

57

58

Political Experiments in Nature. In: Political Analysis 17.4 (2009), pp. 341357.
59

Joshua D. Angrist and Jorn-Steen Pischke. Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricists Companion. Prince-

ton and New York: Princeton University Press, 2009.

60

Dunning, see n. 57; Robinson, McNulty, and Krasno, see n. 58. Following guidelines in Stefano M. Iacus, Gary King, and Giuseppe Porro. Causal Inference without Balance

61

Checking: Coarsened Exact Matching. In: Political Analysis 20.1 (2012), pp. 124, to ensure that municipalities are only matched to similar municipalities we created ordinal versions of these continuous variables and required exact matches. This is analogous to our matching procedure in the previous section.
62

A placebo test for 2006 on the matched set again yields no eect (estimate +0.66, p-value= 0.39). See supple-

mental materials for extended results.

63

e.g. Daniel Posner. The Political Salience of Cultural Dierence: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are Allies in

Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi. In: American Political Science Review 98.4 (2004), pp. 529545; Thad Dunning and Lauren Harrison. Cross-cutting Cleavages and Ethnic Voting: An Experimental Study of Cousinage in Mali. In: American Political Science Review 104 (2010), pp. 2139.
64

Torcal and Mainwaring, see n. 2, p. 84. Ingrid van Biezen. On the Internal Balance of Party Power: Party Organizations in New Democracies. In:

65

Party Politics 6.4 (2000), pp. 395417.

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50

Any ID

Share of Respondents

30

40

PT

10

20

PMDB PSDB 0 1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

Figure 1: Party Identication in Brazil (19892010)

Figure shows a moving average of levels of party identication, as computed by Datafolha. White vertical lines indicate presidential elections. The question was worded exactly the same in all surveys.

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0.25

0.30

q q

always open

Party ID

0.20

close

0.15

q q

never

0.10 20042005

20092010

Figure 2: Identication with the PT by Party Situation in the Municipality (By Electoral Cycle)
Figure shows the share of survey respondents that report identifying with the PT, aggregated by condition of the municipality. Open is the condition of interest.

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0.20

0.20

PT Legislative Vote Share

0.15

0.15

q q q

PT Legislative Vote Share

always (3258) open (940)

always (2201) close (405) open (1449)

q q

q q

close (392)

0.10

0.10

q q q

never (974)

never (1509)
q

0.05

2002

2006

0.05 2006

2010

(a) 2006

(b) 2010

Figure 3: PTs Electoral Performance by Party Situation in the Municipality (By Electoral Cycle)
Results refer to elections for the lower chamber of the national legislature. Numbers of municipalities in each condition are shown in brackets. Open is the condition of interest.

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Table 1: Eect of Civil Society Density on Establishing Local Presence (First Dierences) Logit Baseline Eect (First Dierences) 0.615 (0.031) +0.075 (0.022) 0.001 Logit w GPS Matching 0.539 (0.054) +0.075 (0.028) 0.005

Notes: Table reports rst dierences computed from moving civil society density from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile. Complete results are reported in supplemental materials. Standard errors are shown in parenthesis, p-values in itallics.

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Table 2: Eects of Party Organization on Party Identication (2010) OLS Clustered SE 0.138 (0.021) +0.096 (0.047) 0.041 No OLS Rand. Eects 0.137 (0.020) +0.095 (0.057) 0.097 No Logit Rand. Eects 0.107 (0.027) +0.094 (0.040) 0.007 Yes

Baseline at t0 Eect of Opening a Branch

Individual Level Controls

Table reports dierence-in-dierences estimates for the eect of opening a branch on party identication estimated under three dierent specications. Standard errors of the estimates are reported in parenthesis, p-values of eects are shown in itallics. The sample is composed of 1000 individuals in 42 municipalities in the never or in the open conditions.

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Table 3: Eect of Establishing a Local Presence on Party Legislative Vote-Share, (Dierence-inDierences Estimates by Electoral Cycle) 2006 7.83 (0.21) +1.46 (0.42) <0.01 +0.49 (0.51) 0.33 5905 2010 7.46 (0.31) +2.03 (0.63) <0.01

Baseline t0 Eect of Opening a Branch

Placebo Eect

3822

Table reports coecients of interest from a dierence-in-dierences regression, where the dependent variable is the PT vote share at the municipal level observed at the start and at the end of each cycle. Standard errors of the estimates are reported in parenthesis and p-values in italics. For the 2006 cycle only we also report estimates of a placebo eect, in which treatment was dened by opening a branch in the subsequent cycle; see discussion in the text.

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Table 4: Eect of Establishing a Local Presence on Party Legislative Vote-Share (Dierences-inDierences Estimates on Matched Sample, By Electoral Cycle) 2006 7.84 (0.33) +1.40 (0.67) 0.04 2220 2010 7.66 (0.49) +3.03 (0.98) <0.01 1444

Baseline t0 Eect of Opening a Branch

Table reports dierence-in-dierences estimates, obtained using a reduced dataset preprocessed using non-parametric matching on pre-treatment covariates, as described in the text. The dependent variable is the PT vote share in lowerchamber federal legislative elections observed at the municipal level at the start and at the end of each cycle. Standard errors of the estimates are reported in parenthesis, p-values in italics.

39