Cesar Zucco

Ideology or What? Legislative Behavior in Multiparty Presidential Settings

In this paper I show that voting patterns of Brazilian legislators depart from their ideology in ways that suggest that the president plays an important role in influencing their behavior. Moreover, statistical analysis indicates that this influence is channeled through the distribution of pork and nominations to cabinet positions. Ideology not only fails to fully explain the patterns of legislative behavior observed since the return to democracy, but there is evidence that ideological behavior has declined over time.

Bolsa Família and the Shift in Lula’s Electoral Base, 2002-2006: A Reply to Bohn

In a recent article published in LARR, Simone Bohn analyzed electoral results and survey data from Brazil to contest several theses concerning the reelection of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2006. In particular Bohn asserted that beneficiaries of Bolsa Familia, a conditional cash transfer program that covered 11 million families at the time of the 2006, were already supporters of Lula in 2002, and that the program did not contribute to the change in Lula’s constituency from his election in 2002 to his reelection in 2006. We show these claims are based on voter recall data collected 9 and 57 months after each election analyzed that grossly overestimate support for Lula, probably due to well known reporting biases. Reanalysis of Bohn’s results with the same data, and analysis of more reliable surveys suggests that Bolsa Familia did play a role in the 2006 elections.

Using Facebook as a Subject Recruitment Tool for Survey-Experimental Research

We consider the use of Facebook to recruit participants for online survey-experimental studies of public opinion. Based on two such studies we recently conducted, we discuss sample composition, attention to the task, and the possibility of rewarding participants through a lottery. We show that Facebook can be a cost-effective tool for rapidly recruiting large samples of participants anywhere in the world. These characteristics make it be particularly useful for recruitment of samples from elusive populations and in non-US settings – situations in which MTurk can be of little help.

Crafting Mass Partisanship at the Grass Roots

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.