Barry Ames

The Reverse Coattails Effect: Local Party Organization in the 1989 Brazilian Presidential Election

Increasingly, it is said that the main determinants of electoral outcomes are class, ethnicity, and religion and that local political organizations occupy only marginal roles in national elections. I assess the effects of local party organizations in the presidential election of 1989 in Brazil. Given the long hiatus in competitive politics, the absence of any parties linked to the countrys previous democratic experience, and the weakness of citizen identification with political parties, Brazil should be a textbook example of the collapse of local political organizations. The presidential candidates, however, acted as if party endorsements mattered, and in the context of Brazilian politics, it was rational for municipal mayors to trade blocs of votes for future local benefits. Applying a series of increasingly complex models to the vote shares of the leading candidates, I show that all candidates did significantly better in municipalities where the mayor represented their party. I also show that spatial factors affect the tactics of local politicians, and I distinguish charismatic from purely organizational components of support.

Bases of Support for Mexico's Dominant Party *

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the bases of support for Mexicos Partido Revolucioncrio Institucional. A model is developed which identifies the major and minor variables affecting changes in PRI support in the six elections between 1952 and 1967. Throughout the paper the unit of analysis is the state; the dependent variables are voter turnout and the percentage of the total vote in each state received by the PRI.

Strategy, Careers, and Judicial Decisions: Lessons from the Bolivian Courts

Using survey data from Bolivian trial courts, we explore the relationship between judicial decisions, career goals, and hierarchical pressures in continental legal systems. Based on a principal-agent approach, we hypothesize that inferior court judges are more likely to defer to superior courts when they share their interpretation of the law, when they anticipate reversals, and when they fear political manipulation of judicial careers. In turn, superior judges are likely to exercise informal pressures over inferior court judges who deviate from the formers legal views and do not anticipate their preferences. The conclusions emphasize the utility of survey research for the study of strategic compliance in judicial institutions.

PT no purgatório: ambivalência eleitoral no primeiro turno das eleições presidenciais de 2010

In this paper we investigate the patterns of electoral volatility, at the individual level, in the 2010 Brazilian presidential elections. We explain variation in vote intention before the first round between candidates Jose Serra, Marina Silva, and Dilma Rousseff. A special emphasis is given to the effects of perceptions of corruption and abortion, two hot campaign issues, to explain the final result of the first round. The analysis is based on the first Brazilian Electoral Panel Study (BEPS), which has three waves of interviews with the same nationally representative sample, allowing for measures of how voters changed their minds during the electoral campaign. Results indicate that perceptions about corruption, primed by the eruption of corruption scandals, more than the debate on abortion, stimulated a loss of votes for Dilma Rousseff.

The Dynamics of Partisan Identification When Party Brands Change: The Case of the Workers Party in Brazil

What happens to partisanship when a party undergoes rapid and visible elite-led changes that dilute its traditional brand? We address scholarly debates on the stability of mass partisanship by analyzing the consequences of the major brand change (marked by policy moderation and scandal) experienced by the leftist Brazilian Workers Party (PT) between 2002 and 2006. Analyzing a survey panel with interviews spanning this period, we find that many Brazilian citizens alternated between petismo and independence but rarely crossed party lines. They switched, we demonstrate, in response to political events. While the PT’s brand dilution drove away some traditional petistas, we observe two other dynamics: the rise of a new brand associated with the successful incumbent president (Lula) attracted new adherents, and amid this instability, a core of petistas stood by their party. Our findings suggest that scholarship on partisanship has established a false dichotomy between stability and instability.