Samuels e Zucco 2012 Sobre o PT

7/31/2019 Samuels e Zucco 2012 Sobre o PT

1/39Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2002166

Crafting Mass Partisanship at the Grass Roots, from the Top

Down.

Cesar Zucco

Rutgers University

[email protected]

David Samuels

University of Minnesota

[email protected]

This version: February 26, 2012

Abstract

How does mass partisanship emerge? We explore the varying fates of parties in Brazila de-

cidedly 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

efforts to reach out to organized elements in civil society by expanding its local-level organiza-

tion. We show that the PT invested where civil society was organizationally dense, and that

this led to increased party identification 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, Andre Oliveira, Pedro Ribeiro, Taylor Boas,

Kathryn Hochstetler, and to staff at the IBGE (Juarez Silva Filho), CESOP (Rosilene Gelape), and Datafolha (AnaCristina Cavalcanti de Souza).

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mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


2/39Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2002166

Zucco & Samuels February 26, 2012

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, focus-

ing 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 offers 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 reflect deep historical societal divisions.1 This view highlights a bottom-up,

grass-roots approach to the emergence of mass partisanship. Reflecting 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 offers 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 figure

is somewhat misleading, as most parties remain weakly-sedimented in society.4 More specifically,

since 1989 (when surveys asking a partisanship question were first 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 significant 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 identified 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.]

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means that we lack an intuitive explanation for any observed elective affinity 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 in-

creasingly 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 identifiers,

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 first 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 efforts 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 offers 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 difficult to find. We provide

such direct evidence, and for a difficult 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 top-

down 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 explain-

ing mass partisanship are flip sides sides of the same coin: party elites must consciously invest

in developing organizational links, but their efforts 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 identify-

ing a causal mechanism offered by high-quality data from one country, at the expense of broad com-

parisons. However, our argument is not tied to Brazil. We seek to emulate influential case-specific

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 first 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 final two sections reveal the extent to

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which this strategy has paid off, significantly increasing party identification and electoral support.

Top-Down and Bottom-up Party Building Strategies

Where do mass partisan cleavages come from? There are basically two views. The first 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 conflict.14 This is a largely

sociological view of parties, party systems, and mass partisanship, for it assumes that parties reflect

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 figure out how

to politicize them. How do elites accomplish this? Politicians face two sets of challenges when

attempting to craft partisanship: First they must first 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 efforts

to manipulate political rhetoric and symbols, in an effort to develop a coherent ideological or

programmatic profile. 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 offer 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.

Specifically, 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 insufficient to generate partisan attachments. And even if

broad preexisting latent forms of identity offer 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 affinity with the party doing the outreach. This strategy constitutes

an effort 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 differences 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 findings from comparative parties research.

Echoing Duvergers distinction between elite and mass parties, for example, scholars of Imperial

Germany have long differentiated 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 de-

velop a permanent and continuously active organizational presence at the local level. In Imperial

Germany the Social Democrats (SPD) were the first to try to leverage local organization as an elec-

toral 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 finds 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 affective 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 find the appropriate data, it would be no surprise to find 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

identification to emerge naturally, without explicit crafting from above by self-interested politicians.

Among Brazils parties, the PT offers 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 first consider the PTs solution to the branding challenge, discuss its strategic effort

to disseminate its brand by reaching out to organized civil society through local party-building

efforts, 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 delib-

erate effort 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

officials 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 officials 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 differentiated 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 differ much from other Brazilians in terms of ideology,29 but they do

differ 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 differ 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 differ 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 effort 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

difference 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 offices have

both been part of this strategy.

In particular, since the 1990s the PT has prioritized investing resources in expanding its orga-

nizational reach.31 For example, in 1995 the party affirmed at its National Meeting that it needed

to increase its organizational capillarity by opening additional local branch offices. This effort

explicitly sought to increase membership, improve the partys vote total, and cultivate deeper

partisan attachments,32 goals that have been reaffirmed at all subsequent national meetings.33

The targets of the PTs outreach efforts 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 mod-

erated its ideology. It has pursued a strategy of cultivating mass partisanship both when it was

an insignificant opposition party as well as when it held Brazils presidency. Meneguello was per-

haps the first 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 effort has paid

off, as mass partisanship for the PT has continued to grow.

If the PTs strategy has paid off (a hypothesis we confirm 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 offices, we confirmed

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 different tactics.

The answer lies partly with the path-dependent effects of organizational culture.40 The PMDB

is the successor to the sanctioned opposition party under Brazils 196485 military regime. How-

ever, 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 flows 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

identification with the PMDB has declined as time weakens the memory of the partys origins

under the dictatorship. The PMDB has had this profile since the early 1980s. Although it has lost

partisan identifiers, 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 office-holders from the state of Sao Paulo, Brazils largest and wealthiest.

Yet despite winning the 1994 and 1998 presidential elections, the PSDB has never superseded its

regional nature, and it has made no effort 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-file 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 efficient and

effective 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 different tactics to achieve electoral successclientelism in the

case of the PMDB, and a general appeal to liberal principles of leadership quality, efficiency 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 efforts, and these efforts explain the growth of mass partisanship for the PT. Specifically,

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 benefits from this strategy, in the form of increased party

identification 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 specifically, 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 first 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 offwe 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 office exists or not, andif a branch existsthe number

of eligible and voting members in the partys internal primaries, called the Processo de Eleicoes

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 first discarded all municipalities in which the PT was already present

in 2001, with presence defined as whether at least one PT member voted in the partys 2001 PED.

We then defined 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 legally-

registered local branch office, because we want to measure the partys effective 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 difference 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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efforts.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 Geografia e Estatstica

(Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, IBGE).48 These are actual counts of legally-

registered 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 effective 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 effect 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

first 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 edu-

cation, 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 different levels of civil society density. Hence, our indicator of civil society

density could be capturing other unobserved differences that exist between municipalities. To gain

confidence in our findings, we also analyzed the data using a generalized propensity score (GPS)

matching approach51a matching procedure that can be employed when the causal variable of

interest is continuous.52

This involves a two-step estimation process. We first estimated a regression in which we pre-

dicted 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 pre-

vious 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 effect is the average of the effect 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 first differences for our causal variable of interest plus the baseline result. Results for civil

society density are both statistically significant 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 effects after matching are very similar, and remain statistically significant

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. Over-

all, 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 significant effect 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 effect on the partys decision

to open a branch. But does the PT actually benefit from setting up shop? Can we tell, for instance,

whether any observed improved electoral performance is simply an effect of pro-PT conditions in

the municipality that also lead to opening a branch? In the next two sections we adopt a different

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 Identification

Having confirmed 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 off. In this

section we explore the hypothesis that the PTs local-level organizational expansion strengthens

its ties with voters, which should be reflected in higher levels of party identification.

Data & Methods: We seek to assess the growth in partisan identification 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 identification

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 identification among all

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voters at the municipal level exists for all municipalities across Brazil.

To get around this problem, we combine data from different nationally-representative surveys

to estimate partisanship levels under different conditions. Each survey we used asked respondents

the same question about whether they identified with a particular political party, and each survey

also identified the municipality in which the respondent was interviewed. Unfortunately, only those

surveys fielded after March 2002 identify respondents municipality, which restricts our analysis of

the effects of opening a branch on party identification 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 identification by each condition. These values were obtained by

pooling surveys taken around 2005 (t0) and 2009 (t1). Clearly, identification with the PT increases

relatively more in municipalities where it opened a branch (dashed line) than in any of the other

three categories. This figure provides preliminary evidence supporting our hypothesis.


The increase shown in the dashed line in Figure 2 has to be assessed against a baseline. Munic-

ipalities 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 definition of

causal effect we employ, and the estimates we report in the remainder of this paper, rest on this

comparison.

We implemented a standard differences-in-differences (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 branchdiffer significantly 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 firmer grounds for causal inference.

The DiD analysis is very simple: we regress an indicator of party identificationcoded as 1 if

individual i in municipality j at time t identifies with the PTon two dummy variables and their

interaction. The first 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 coefficient on the interaction term is therefore

the estimate of the causal effect of opening a branch in a treated municipality at t1.

We estimated treatment effects using linear probability models. Since the independent variables

are dummies that define subgroups of observations, the coefficients are the mean values of the

dependent variables in each such subgroup. In our case, the dependent variable is a dichotomous

indicator of identification with the PT, so coefficients can be directly interpreted as proportions

of voters in the subgroups defined by the dummies. A linear probability model is appropriate

even though our dependent variable is dichotomous because the two dummies and their interaction

define 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 different 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 municipal-

ities, 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 effect 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 different conditions.

We adjusted for this hierarchical structure of our data in two ways: first, by clustering standard

errors by municipality (which accounts for the fact that individuals are not independent observa-

tions but are clustered in municipalities); and second, by employing a random-effects model (which

allows treatment effects to vary across municipalities). We also estimate a third model, demon-

strating 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 effects, because

the model is no longer saturated.

Results: Table 2 reports treatment effects and the baseline levels of party identification for these

three models. For the two linear probability models, we report the the intercept and the coefficient

on the interaction term, which can be directly interpreted as the baseline proportion and treatment

effect, respectively. In the logit model we report the predicted baseline probability and marginal

effects 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 in-

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clusion of controls picks up some of the variance, which leads to narrower standard errors. The

marginal effects of treatment, however, are almost identical to the average treatment effects esti-

mated 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

off handsomelyeven outside of large and wealthy urban areas, where the party has its historical

roots.


Party Organization and Electoral Performance

Our results support the contention that parties can strategically craft partisanship from the top-

down, 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 off. 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, fluctuates 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 simplifies

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 confidence 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 flat 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 figures again provide prima facie evidence supporting our hypothesis.


To confirm 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 effect. To

simplify presentation of results, we focus on this last coefficient and the baseline vote share in the

control group at the start of the cycle, so that the substantive magnitude of the treatment effect

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 significantly better in municipalities where it establishes a

branch prior to the election. The estimate is statistically significant, and amounts to a 1.5 and 2.0

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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 effect, increasing the PTs vote share by roughly 18 to 27 percent compared to its baseline

vote share, in both years.


Robustness Checks: Do these results really indicate a causal association between local presence

and electoral performance? The crucial identification 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 affect the partys subsequent

electoral performance, our causal inference will be flawed. 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 first cycle. This involves re-estimating

the DiD model using the subsequent periods treatment indicator. Party organization cannot

logically have an effect 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 first 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 first 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

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actually opening a branch) is driving the PTs improved performance. If results reported above

were simply capturing the effect of unobserved municipal characteristics on PT performance

rather than actually capturing the effects 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 effect was small and statistically insignificant. 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 first election cycle, nominal effects 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 effectsprovide solid support for our causal claim, that the

PTs strategy of organizing where civil society is relatively denser pays off in terms of votes for the

partys legislative candidates.62


Discussion & Conclusion

The emerging partisan cleavage in contemporary Brazil has been fundamentally crafted from the

top downin particular, by the PTs strategic efforts to consolidate support at the mass level

by engaging organized civil society. The PT is the only Brazilian party to have undertaken such

efforts, 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 effort 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 efforts where they believed this strategy would generate the highest

returns: where civil society was relatively well-organized. Such an effort fit 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 efforts 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

offer 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.

Specifically, 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 policy-

making efforts.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 offices, in an effort 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 findings suggest that parties can supply their product

their brand nameand reap profit 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 difficulty of finding reli-

able data on civil-society density and on local-level party organization, this paper offers the first

demonstration of the tactics effectiveness 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 net-

works. Likewise, the decision of the PTs rivals not to pursue a similar strategy echoes the choices

other parties have made, in different countries and in different 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 identification among voters. This model is Duvergers classic

elite party, and it remains prevalent across new democracies in particular.65 However, many

parties may find the tactic of reaching out to elements in civil society a profitable strategy. Future

scholarship should investigate further the conditions under which and ways that parties and civil

society interact to form partisan cleavages.

Notes

1Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan. Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives. New

York: The Free Press, 1967.

2Giovanni Sartori. Politics, Ideology, and Belief Systems. In: The American Political Science Review63.2 (1969),

pp. 398411; Adam Przeworski and John D. Sprague. Paper stones: A history of electoral socialism. Chicago:

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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.

3John Huber, Georgia Kernell, and Eduardo Leoni. Institutional Context, Cognitive Resources, and Party At-

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

4Herbert Kitschelt et al. Latin American Party Systems. Cambrige: Cambridge, 2010.

5Data 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).

6Rachel Meneguello. PT: A formacao de um partido, 1979-1982. Sao Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1989; Margaret Keck.

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

7David Samuels. Sources of Mass Partisanship in Brazil. In: Latin American Politics and Society 48.2 (2006),

pp. 127.

8Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully. Building Democratic Instituions: Party System in Latin America. Stan-

ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

9e.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.

10Wendy Hunter. The Normalization of an Anomaly: The Workers Party in Brazil. In: World Politics 59.3

(2007), pp. 440475.

11Samuels, Sources of Mass Partisanship in Brazil, see n. 7.

12Pradeep Chhibber and Mariano Tocal. Elite Strategy, Social Cleavages, and Party Systems in a New Democracy

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).

13Lipset and Rokkan, see n. 1.

14Torcal and Mainwaring, see n. 2, p. 57.

15Torcal and Mainwaring, see n. 2, p.59.

16Przeworski and Sprague, see n. 2.

17Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson. Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics .

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

18

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

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

19See 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.

20Maurice Duverger. Political Parties. New York: Wiley, 1954, p. xxvii.

21Ross McKibbin. The ideologies of class: social relations in Britain, 1880-1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1990. isbn: 9780198221609, p. 90.

22John 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.

23Paul 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 effects of local campaigning on voting in the 1997 British general election. In: Electoral Studies 22.2

(2003), pp. 301324.

24Steven Levitsky. Transforming labor-based parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in comparative perspec-

tive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

25Stathis Kalyvas. The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

26Samuels, Incentives to Cultivate a Party Vote in Candidate-centric Electoral Systems: Evidence from Brazil,

see n. 9.

27Samuels, Incentives to Cultivate a Party Vote in Candidate-centric Electoral Systems: Evidence from Brazil,

see n. 9, p. 511.

28Wendy 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.

30Fundacao Perseu Abramo. Cultura Poltica BRASIL06.MAR-02483. Interviewed 2379 people between on

March 10-16, 2006. In: Banco de Dados do Centro de Estudos de Opiniao Publica. http://www.cesop.unicamp.b

r/site/htm/busca/php, accessed on 09/01/2008: CESOP-UNICAMP, 2006.

31Pedro Ribeiro. Dos sindicatos ao governo: a organizacao nacional do PT de 1980 a 2005. Sao Paulo: UFS-

Car/FAPESP, 2010, p. 245; Oswaldo Amaral. As Transformacoes na Organizacao Interna do Partido dos Trabal-

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: America Latina Hoy 44 (2006), pp. 153184.

30
http://www.cesop.unicamp.br/site/htm/busca/phphttp://www.cesop.unicamp.br/site/htm/busca/phphttp://www.cesop.unicamp.br/site/htm/busca/phphttp://www.cesop.unicamp.br/site/htm/busca/php


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32Partido dos Trabalhadores. Resolucoes de encontros e congressos: 1979-1998. Sao Paulo, 1998, p. 637.

33Ribeiro, Dos sindicatos ao governo: a organizacao nacional do PT de 1980 a 2005, see n. 31, p. 245; Partido dos

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

34Pedro 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.

35Meneguello, see n. 6; Keck, see n. 6.

36Amaral, see n. 31, p.99.

37Amaral, see n. 31, p.218.

38Meneguello, see n. 6.

39Fundacao Perseu Abramo. Eleicoes: PT cresce e vence 559 prefeituras. Teoria e Debate n. 79. 2009.

40Angelo Panebianco. Organization and Power. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

41Frances Hagopian. Traditional politics and regime change in Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

42Roma, Organizaciones De Partido En Brasil: El PT y el PSDB Bajo Perspectiva Comparada, see n. 31.

43Daniel Bramatti and Julia Dualibbi. Filiados tucanos desconhecem partido. In: Estado de Sao Paulo (Jan 29,

2012), A12; Celso Roma. A Institucionalizacao Do PSDB Entre 1988 E 1999. In: Revista Brasileira De Ciencias

Sociais 17.49 (2002), pp. 7192, p. 79.

44Fernando Henrique Cardoso. O Papel da Oposicao. In: Interesse Nacional 4.13 (2011), pp. 1019.

45McKibbin, see n. 21.

46Partido dos Trabalhadores. Dados Oficiais do PED. Excell Spreadsheet. 2011.

47We explored continuous definitions of party presence, but found that although significant differences exist between

no presence and some presence, different levels of presence were indistinguishable from each other. Results

are available from the authors.

48IBGEInstituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatstica. As Fundacoes Privadas e Associacoes sem Fins Lucrativos

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

49See the supplemental materials for more information on these data.

50All of our control variables are publicly available online from the Brazilian Institute of Applied Economic Research

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

51Kosuke 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.

52Matching 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.

53Imai and van Dyk, see n. 51.

54For a discussion of the balance achieved after matching, see the supplemental materials.

55Some control variables are also significant predictors of opening a branch. See supplemental materials for details.

56Details about the surveys used can be found in the supplemental materials.

57Thad Dunning. Improving Causal Inference. In: Political Research Quarterly 61.2 (2008), pp. 282293.

58Gregory Robinson, John E. McNulty, and Jonathan S. Krasno. Observing the Counterfactual? The Search for

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

59Joshua D. Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke. Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricists Companion. Prince-

ton and New York: Princeton University Press, 2009.

60Dunning, see n. 57; Robinson, McNulty, and Krasno, see n. 58.

61Following guidelines in Stefano M. Iacus, Gary King, and Giuseppe Porro. Causal Inference without Balance

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.

62A placebo test for 2006 on the matched set again yields no effect (estimate +0.66, p-value= 0.39). See supple-

mental materials for extended results.

63e.g. Daniel Posner. The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: 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.

64Torcal and Mainwaring, see n. 2, p. 84.

65Ingrid van Biezen. On the Internal Balance of Party Power: Party Organizations in New Democracies. In:

Party Politics 6.4 (2000), pp. 395417.

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1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

0

10

20

30

40

50

ShareofRespondents

PT

PMDBPSDB

Any ID

Figure 1: Party Identification in Brazil (19892010)

Figure shows a moving average of levels of party identification, as computed by Datafolha. White vertical lines

indicate presidential elections. The question was worded exactly the same in all surveys.

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0.1

0

0

.15

0.2

0

0.2

5

0.3

0

never

close

openalways

20042005 20092010

PartyID

Figure 2: Identification 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 themunicipality. Open is the condition of interest.

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0.0

5

0.1

0

0.1

5

0.20

never (1509)

open (1449)

close (405)

always (2201)

2002 2006

PT

Legislative

Vote

Share

(a) 2006

0.0

5

0.1

0

0.1

5

0.20

never (974)

close (392)

open (940)

always (3258)

2006 2010

PT

Legislative

Vote

Share

(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 conditionare shown in brackets. Open is the condition of interest.

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Table 1: Effect of Civil Society Density on Establishing Local Presence (First Differences)

Logit Logitw GPS Matching

Baseline 0.615 0.539(0.031) (0.054)

Effect (First Differences) +0.075 +0.075

(0.022) (0.028)0.001 0.005

Notes: Table reports first differences computed from moving civil society density from the 25th percentile to the75th percentile. Complete results are reported in supplemental materials. Standard errors are shown in parenthesis,p-values in itallics.

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Table 2: Effects of Party Organization on Party Identification (2010)

OLSClustered SE

OLSRand.Effects

LogitRand. Effects

Baseline at t0 0.138 0.137 0.107(0.021) (0.020) (0.027)

Effect of Opening a Branch +0.096 +0.095 +0.094(0.047) (0.057) (0.040)

0.041 0.097 0.007 Individual Level Controls No No Yes

Table reports difference-in-differences estimates for the effect of opening a branch on party identification estimatedunder three different specifications. Standard errors of the estimates are reported in parenthesis, p-values of effectsare shown in itallics. The sample is composed of 1000 individuals in 42 municipalities in the never or in the openconditions.

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Table 3: Effect of Establishing a Local Presence on Party Legislative Vote-Share, (Difference-in-Differences Estimates by Electoral Cycle)

2006 2010

Baseline t0 7.83 7.46(0.21) (0.31)

Effect of Opening a Branch +1.46 +2.03(0.42) (0.63)


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Table 4: Effect of Establishing a Local Presence on Party Legislative Vote-Share (Differences-in-Differences Estimates on Matched Sample, By Electoral Cycle)

2006 2010

Baseline t0 7.84 7.66(0.33) (0.49)

Effect of Opening a Branch +1.40 +3.03(0.67) (0.98)

0.04

Samuels e Zucco 2012 Sobre o PT

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