Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-9pm4c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T17:36:52.501Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Crafting Mass Partisanship at the Grass Roots

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2014

David Samuels  and
Cesar Zucco
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What are the sources of mass partisanship? The focus of this article is on the role of party organizational strategies in Brazil, where sociological cleavages are weak. All Brazilian parties post electoral gains by opening local branch offices, but only the Workers’ Party (PT) manages to win voters’ hearts and minds, cultivating mass partisan identification. This follows from its deliberate effort to use its local party organization to reach out to organized civil society – to ‘mobilize the organized.’ Results further indicate that the PT only gains partisan identifiers where civil society is organizationally dense. Together, this suggests that party strategy to cultivate partisanship is insufficient: pre-existing organizational networks must exist in civil society, meaning that ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ strategies are two sides of the same coin.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 755 - 775
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota; Department of Political Science, Fundação Getúlio Vargas (emails: dsamuels@umn.edu; cesar.zucco@fgv.br). Supplementary information, data and replication code is permanently available in the Dataverse Network and accessible through the following address: http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/23575. Versions of this article were presented at the conference on Party-Building in Latin America at Harvard University and at the workshop ‘The PT from Lula to Dilma,’ at the University of Oxford. The authors thank David Art, Oswaldo Amaral, Kosuke Imai, Rachel Meneguello, André Oliveira, Pedro Ribeiro, Taylor Boas, and Kathryn Hochstetler for their comments, and the staff at the IBGE (Juarez Silva Filho), CESOP (Rosilene Gelape), and Datafolha (Ana Cristina Cavalcanti de Souza) for granting access to data. Online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123413000549

References

Amaral, Oswaldo. 2010. As Transformações na Organização Interna do Partido dos Trabalhadores Entre 1995 e 2009. Doctoral dissertation. Unicamp, Campinas.Google Scholar
Ames, Barry. 2001. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Margaret. 2000. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Angrist, Joshua D. Pischke, Jorn-Steffen. 2009. Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Arceneaux, Kevin. 2005. Using Cluster Randomized Field Experiments to Study Voting Behavior. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 601:169–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bramatti, Daniel Dualibbi, Julia. 2012. Filiados tucanos desconhecem partido. Estado de São Paulo 29 January, A12.Google Scholar
Campello, Daniela. 2012. What's Left of the Brazilian Left? Unpublished manuscript, Princeton University.Google Scholar
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique. 2011. O Papel da Oposição. Interesse Nacional 4 (13):10–19.Google Scholar
Carmines, Edward G. Stimson, James A.. 1989. Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chhibber, Pradeep Torcal, Mariano. 1997. Elite Strategy, Social Cleavages, and Party Systems in a New Democracy Spain. Comparative Political Studies 30 (1):27–54.Google Scholar
Dunning, Thad. 2008. Improving Causal Inference. Political Research Quarterly 61 (2):282–293.Google Scholar
Dunning, Thad Harrison, Lauren. 2010. Cross-Cutting Cleavages and Ethnic Voting: An Experimental Study of Cousinage in Mali. American Political Science Review 104:21–39.Google Scholar
Duverger, Maurice. 1954. Political Parties. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Frendreis, John P., Gibson, James L. Vertz, Laura L.. 1990. The Electoral Relevance of Local Party Organizations. American Political Science Review 84 (1):225–235.Google Scholar
Fundação Perseu Abramo. 2006. . Cultura Política – BRASIL06.MAR-02483. Interviewed 2,379 people between on March 10–16, 2006. Banco de Dados do Centro de Estudos de Opinião Pública. Available from http://www.cesop.unicamp.br/site/htm/busca/php, accessed on 01/07/2014: CESOP-UNICAMPGoogle Scholar
Green, Donald P. Vavreck, Lynn. 2008. Analysis of Cluster-Randomized Experiments: A Comparison of Alternative Estimation Approaches. Political Analysis 16:138–152.Google Scholar
Hagopian, Frances. 1996. Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hale, H.E. 2006. Why Not Parties in Russia? Democracy, Federalism, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ho, Daniel E., Imai, Kosuke, King, Gary Stuart, Elizabeth A.. 2007. Matching as Nonparametric Preprocessing for Reducing Model Dependence in Parametric Causal Inference. Political Analysis 15 (3):199–236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, John, Kernell, Georgia Leoni, Eduardo. 2005. Institutional Context, Cognitive Resources, and Party Attachments across Democracies. Political Analysis 13 (4):365–386.Google Scholar
Hunter, Wendy. 2010. The Transformation of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, 1989–2009. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iacus, Stefano M., King, Gary Porro, Giuseppe. 2012. Causal Inference without Balance Checking: Coarsened Exact Matching. Political Analysis 20 (1):1–24.Google Scholar
IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. 2004. As Fundações Privadas e Associações sem Fins Lucrativos no Brasil, 2002. Estudos e Pesquisas: Informação Econômica 4. Rio de Janeiro.Google Scholar
Kalyvas, Stathis. 1996. The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keck, Margaret. 1992. The Workers’ Party and Democratization in Brazil. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kitschelt, Herbert, et al. 2010. Latin American Party Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven. 2003. Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipset, Seymour M. Rokkan, Stein. 1967. Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Lupu, Noam. 2013. Party Brands and Partisanship: Theory with Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Argentina. American Journal of Political Science 57 (1):49–64.Google Scholar
Mainwaring, Scott. 1999. Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Mainwaring, Scott Scully, Timothy. 1995. Building Democratic Institutions: Party System in Latin America. Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
McKibbin, Ross. 1990. The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Meneguello, Rachel. 1989. PT: A formação de um partido, 1979–1982. São Paulo: Paz e Terra.Google Scholar
Panebianco, Angelo. 1988. Organization and Power. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Partido dos Trabalhadores. 1998. Resoluções de encontros e congressos: 1979–1998. São Paulo: Partido dos Trabalhadores.Google Scholar
Partido dos Trabalhadores. 2007. Resuluções do 3° Congresso do Partido dos Trabalhadores. Porto Alegre: Partido dos Trabalhadores.Google Scholar
Posner, Daniel. 2004. The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi. American Political Science Review 98 (4):529–545.Google Scholar
Power, Timothy Zucco, Cesar Jr. 2012. Elite Preferences in a Consolidating Democracy: The Brazilian Legislative Surveys, 1990–2009. Latin American Politics and Society 54 (4):1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Przeworski, Adam Sprague, John D.. 1986. Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Pedro. 2010. Dos sindicatos ao governo: a organização nacional do PT de 1980 a 2005. São Paulo: UFSCar/FAPESP.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Pedro. 2012. 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’, 27 January 2012, Brazil Studies Centre, University of Oxford.Google Scholar
Robinson, Gregory, McNulty, John E. Krasno, Jonathan S.. 2009. Observing the Counterfactual? The Search for Political Experiments in Nature. Political Analysis 17 (4):341–357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roma, Celso. 2002. A Institucionalização do PSDB entre 1988 e 1999. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 17 (49):71–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roma, Celso. 2006. Organizaciones de Partido en Brasil: El PT y el PSDB Bajo Perspectiva Comparada. América Latina Hoy 44:153–184.Google Scholar
Samuels, David. 1999. Incentives to Cultivate a Party Vote in Candidate-centric Electoral Systems: Evidence from Brazil. Comparative Political Studies 32 (4):487–518.Google Scholar
Samuels, David. 2006. Sources of Mass Partisanship in Brazil. Latin American Politics and Society 48 (2):1–27.Google Scholar
Samuels, David Zucco, Cesar Jr. 2014. The Power of Partisanship in Brazil: Evidence from Survey Experiments. American Journal of Political Science 58 (1):212–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Jonathan. 1997. The Kaiser's Voters. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tavits, Margit. 2012. Organizing for Success: Party Organizational Strength and Electoral Performance in Post-Communist Europ. Journal of Politics 74 (1):83–97.Google Scholar
Torcal, Mariano Mainwaring, Scott. 2003. The Political Re-Crafting of Social Bases of Party Competition: The Case of Chile 1973–95. British Journal of Political Science 33 (1):55–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Biezen, Ingrid. 2000. On the Internal Balance of Party Power: Party Organizations in New Democracies. Party Politics 6 (4):395–417.Google Scholar
Whiteley, P Seyd, P. 2003. How to Win a Landslide by Really Trying: The Effects of Local Campaigning on Voting in the 1997 British General Election. Electoral Studies 22 (2):301–324.Google Scholar
Whiteley, Paul F., Seyd, Patrick, Richardson, Jeremy Bissell, Paul. 1994. Explaining Party Activism: The Case of the British Conservative Party. British Journal of Political Science 24 (1):79–94.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Samuels and Zucco Supplementary Material

Supplementary Material

Download Samuels and Zucco Supplementary Material(PDF)
PDF 176.5 KB