Suchergebnisse

The Volatility Curse examines the conditions under which economic voting can (and cannot) function as a mechanism of democratic accountability, challenging existing theories that are largely based on experiences in developed democracies. Drawing on cross-national data from around the world and micro-level evidence from Latin America, Daniela Campello and Cesar Zucco make two broad, related arguments. First, they show that economic voting is pervasive around the world, but in economically volatile developing democracies that are dependent on commodity exports and inflows of foreign capital, economic outcomes are highly contingent on conditions beyond government control, which nonetheless determine relevant political outcomes like elections, popular support, and government transitions. Second, politicians are aware of these misattribution patterns and are often able to anticipate their electoral prospects well before elections. This reduces incumbents' incentives to maximize voter welfare, as anticipated by economic voting theories, and increases the likelihood of shirking, waste, and corruption.

Conventional wisdom suggests that partisanship has little impact on voter behavior in Brazil; what matters most is pork-barreling, incumbent performance, and candidates' charisma. This book shows that soon after redemocratization in the 1980s, over half of Brazilian voters expressed either a strong affinity or antipathy for or against a particular political party. In particular, that the contours of positive and negative partisanship in Brazil have mainly been shaped by how people feel about one party - the Workers' Party (PT). Voter behavior in Brazil has largely been structured around sentiment for or against this one party, and not any of Brazil's many others. The authors show how the PT managed to successfully cultivate widespread partisanship in a difficult environment, and also explain the emergence of anti-PT attitudes. They then reveal how positive and negative partisanship shape voters' attitudes about politics and policy, and how they shape their choices in the ballot booth.

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.

To what extent do party labels influence individuals' policy positions? Much research has examined this question in the United States, where party identification can generate both in-group and out-group pressures to conform to a party's position. However, relatively little research has considered the question's comparative generalizability. We explore the impact of party labels on attitudes in Brazil, a relatively new democracy with a fragmented party system. In such an environment, do parties function as in-groups, out-groups, or neither? We answer this question through two survey experiments, one conducted on a nationally representative sample and another on a convenience sample recruited via Facebook. We find that both in- and out-group cues shape the opinions of identifiers of Brazil's two main parties but that cues have no effect on nonpartisans. Results suggest that party identification can structure attitudes and behavior even in 'party-averse' electoral environments. Adapted from the source document.

What is the source of the Partido dos Trabalhadores' (PT) success? And is the PT likely to thrive into the future as a key player in Brazil's party system? In this paper we weigh in on an emerging debate about Lula's role in the PT's rise to power. Without Lula's ability to win more votes than his party, we might not be discussing lulismo at all, much less its difference from petismo. Yet despite Lula's fame, fortune, and extraordinary political capabilities, lulismo is a comparatively weak psychological phenomenon relative to and independently of petismo. Lulismo mainly reflects positive retrospective evaluations of Lula's performance in office. To the extent that it indicates anything more, it constitutes an embryonic form of petismo. The ideas that constitute lulismo are similar to the ideas that constitute petismo in voters' minds, and they have been so since the party's founding - a nonrevolutionary quest to make Brazilian democracy more equitable and more participatory. Both lulismo and petismo are key sources of the PT's strength, but petismo is likely to endure long after Lula has departed the political scene. (GIGA)

ABSTRACTThis research note contributes updated and extended point estimates of the ideological positions of Brazilian political parties and novel estimates of the positions of all presidents since redemocratization in 1985. Presidents and parties are jointly responsible for the operability of Brazil's version of coalitional presidentialism. Locating these key political actors in a unidimensional left–right space over time reveals rising challenges to the institutional matrix, particularly since 2013. Ideological polarization among parties has sharply increased, presidents have become more distant from Congress, and the political center has become increasingly vacated. Coalitional presidentialism is being subjected to unprecedented ideological stress as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva begins his third term in office.

This paper examines the origins and evolution of the direita envergonhada ("embarrassed right") phenomenon, a pattern of ideological obfuscation by right-of-center politicians that was originally identified and documented in post-authoritarian Brazil. Conservative politicians refused to identify themselves as right-wing, defining themselves instead as centrists and placing themselves ideologically to the left of their own political parties. We find that this phenomenon is not restricted to Brazil, but is widespread across Latin America's Third Wave of democratization. We also find that politicians personally connected to the defunct authoritarian regime were more likely to engage in obfuscation and that, contrary to previous hypotheses, obfuscation has faded in recent times.