Zucco

Stability Without Roots: Party System Institutionalization in Brazil
Cesar Zucco Instituto Universit ario de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro czucco@iuperj.br

This version: November 16, 2008
It is relatively easy to label as uid or inchoate a party system where more than ten parties consistently gain representation to congress, where personalistic appeals to the electorate are the norm, where legislators and other politicians switch parties frequently, where half the voters do not self identify with any party, and where even those that do identify have a very weak notion of ideology. However, do we maintain this judgement even if such a system exhibited conspicuously declining electoral volatility and only two parties have dominated presidential elections for two decades? Probably yes, because volatility is only one of four dimensions of party system institutionalization, as I explore in more detail in the remaining of this section. If we add as I do in Section 3 that such a system has produced a relatively long period in which political strife has been all but absent, where (most) relevant groups in society feel somewhat represented, and where elections results are considered legitimate, the picture is much less clear. Brazilian politics provides a very interesting vantage point for thinking about party system institutionalization precisely because it has kept many of the characteristics that made it an inchoate party system to the eyes of observers more than 15 years ago, but in the same period has exhibited very striking patterns of overall political stability. Parties do not play all the roles
Prepared for the Seminar Institucionalizaci on de los Sistemas de Partidos en Am erica Latina, November 20 and 21, 2008, Fundaci on CIDOB, Barcelona. The author thanks the Center for the Study of Public Opinion (CESOP-UNICAMP) for making their impressive collection of Brazilian surveys publicly available. Special thanks to Rosilene Gelape for patiently and diligently processing my many requests for data.
Institutionalization
Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008
prescribed in the four already classic dimensions of party system institutionalization, but they have played a signicant role in the stabilization of the countrys political system. The contributions of this paper are twofold. The rst is is empirical, and limited to the Brazilian experience. I present evidence to show that except for a sharp reduction in electoral volatility, the Brazilian party system still lacks most of the attributes of what would be required of an institutionalized party system. Surprisingly, despite this lack of party system institutionalization, the country has experienced two decades of political stability and peaceful resolution of political conicts. The paper attempts to reconcile these two contradictory facts. The second contribution is conceptual, and involves an attempt to differentiate, in a more systematic way, between the indicators of party system institutionalization and its outcomes. The main goal here is simply to push us to think a little harder about what we really mean by party system institutionalization, but this initial conceptual discussion blends into the analysis of the case of Brazil, leading to the argument that an institutionalized party system is not a necessary condition for stability, even though it might be necessary for strong notions of political representation. The evidence I present suffers from all the limitations of a single country study, but on the other hand, has the advantage of allowing discussion of some important nuances that do not make it into comparative works.1 Furthermore, the position of the country in comparative perspective makes it an interesting case to probe the general level of tness of the concept. The paper follows a very simple structure. In the next section, I deal with some of the conceptual issues mentioned above. The following section explores several indicators that track the evolution of the levels of party system institutionalization in Brazil and the subsequent one deals with the aggregate outcomes of the political process. The nal section discusses the possible implications of the Brazilian case for the study of party system institutionalization in more general terms.
The paper relies on a large number of national surveys, conducted in Brazil by four different pollsters between 1989 and 2006. Almost all of these surveys were collected and organized by CESOP-UNICAMP, and are available directly from them upon request. The paper also makes limited use of data from the Latinobarometro, which was accessed through the Princeton University Library.
1
The Concept of Party System Institutionalization
Ever since the notion of party system institutionalization was proposed by Mainwaring & Scully (1995), the concept has proved to be almost as elusive as it is intuitive and useful. The notion emerged to capture the idea that party systems in the developing world were qualitatively different than those in the established western democracies (Mainwaring & Torcal 2006), and that much os this difference could be captured by adding the level of institutionalization to the standard dimensions of number of parties and degree of polarization (Sartori 1976). Ever since the original formulation of MS, the concept was a combination of stability of the patterns of interparty competition, the depth of the party systems roots in society, the legitimacy of parties and the electoral process, and the organizational aspects of parties. In the original formulation, the four components of party system institutionalization were very unequally measured. Electoral volatility provided an objective measure of the patterns of competition; roots in society were very indirectly (though objectively) measured by the congruence between presidential and legislative elections and the age of parties; legitimacy was very loosely mentioned; and partys organization was discussed even more informally. Hence, in effect, much of the nuances of the concept were lost. Only one and a half of the four components were effectively measured, and the subjective assessments of the remaining components are likely to be biased by the previous ones. In essence, the index reduces to basically one single dimension, which could be captured almost as well by volatility alone. Clearly, this does not match the concept. In a more recent formulation, Mainwaring & Torcal (2006) recognize the empirical limitations of the original formulation, and concentrate on just the rst two dimensions, which a are more completely measured. Party roots in society are operationalized as the programmatic or ideological linkages between voters and parties and are measured using survey data. Special attention is paid to the degree of personalistic (as opposed to party based) linkages between voters and candidates, measured as the vote share obtained by outsiders. MT show that more established regimes are signicantly different than the post-1978 regimes in both of these aspects, as well as with regards to the stability of interparty competition (volatility). It is almost impossible to talk about institutionalization without implying that a more institutionalized system is better. In fact, this is a point that is made quite explicitly. In the original formulation, the argument was not that institutionalization was necessary or desirable, but
3
rather than non institutionalized party systems create problems (Mainwaring & Scully 1995, p.26). In terms of specic outcomes, different pieces have made claims about the association of the level of institutionalization of the party system with the overall health of democracy, because of direct effects on accountability, governability, and poor governance.2 Still, in testing these propositions there are a number of conceptual and empirical issues to be dealt with, some of which I now discuss. Conceptual issues: Some conceptual issues need clarifying, most of which have to do with
the fact that it is not always clear what exactly are the indicators of an institutionalized party system, and what are the outcomes, and sometimes certain measures appear to be simultaneously indicators of the concept and measures of the outcome. In this paper, I argue that before plunging into the search of better indicators for comparative work, we should seeking greater conceptual clarity. There are reasons to suspect that there is not a necessary relationship between the presence of some of the individual components of party system institutionalization and the positive outcomes commonly associated with an institutionalized party system. This point is key to the paper, and deserves special attention. In the next section I begin discussing empirical evidence from Brazil that illustrates this possibility. In Table 1, I attempt to map some of the arguments presented in several texts that address party system institutionalization and its consequences. This is a tentative table, and the fact that it has changed many times since the rst draft of thus paper has convinced myself that the issue is not as straightforward as it might seem. Volatility is by far the most self evident dimension of the concept, but it is not completely unproblematic. The notion of volatility is very close to that of stability, and stability itself is very close to the idea of institutionalization broadly understood. This might cause one to ask whether low volatility is a consequence of having institutionalized parties, whether it is the same as having institutionalized parties, or whether it reects one necessary but not sufcient condition for institutionalized parties. Here I side with the bulk of the literature that tends to regard volatility as the last of these options. It reects the notion that stable patterns of competition between parties contribute to, but are different from, party system institutionalization, which implies positive outcomes and stability in a broader level. Legitimacy, on the other hand, is maybe the most elusive of the all dimensions. Parties are
2
This list of actual problematic outcomes is longer, but I have grouped them under these three general topics.
Table 1: What is Party System Institutionalization?

Dimensions Stability of Competition Indicators Volatility Congruence & Ticket Splitting Age of parties Presence of Outsiders Party Identication Ideological Stability Support for parties Party resources Local presence Internal rules & Changes in leadership Control of access to ballot Party switches Legislative discipline Consequences Democratic survival Legislative turnover Policy stability/predictability Accountability Personalism/populism Predictability Governability Elitist Policies Presence of outsiders Erratic leadership
Roots in Society
Legitimacy
Party Organization
Personalism
said to be legitimate to the extent that political actors have a positive attitude toward them (Mainwaring 1999, p.35). However, it is also seems to be the case, most notably in the original text, that legitimacy refers to elections and electoral processes, and not just to parties. In this sense, Mainwaring & Scully (1995, p.5) state that the dimension captures the extent to which the major political actors accord legitimacy to the electoral process and to parties. Finally, legitimacy can also be assessed from the point of view of elites or from that of voters.3 In this paper, I attempt to consider all of these aspects. Another point in which concepts are not clear has to do with the presence and success of outsiders. Outsiders are treated sometimes as an indicator of roots in society (Mainwaring 1999, p.33), and in other a consequence of lack of roots and of lack of legitimacy of parties (Mainwaring & Torcal 2006, p.205). When one thinks of roots in society as some measure of attachment between voters and specic parties, and legitimacy as some measure of the general acceptance of parties or even of the electoral process, it seems clear that the presence of outliers has to be an outcome. In this paper, I treat it is as such.
Mainwaring & Scully say that in a legitimate system political elites base their behavior on the expectation tt elections will be the primary rout to governing.
3
Empirical Aspects: Much of the empirical work on the subject has been done on measurement of the different dimensions of party system institutionalization, and on showing that the several dimensions of the concept vary greatly across countries. However, the question whether these characteristics are, in fact, associated with the outcomes remains from the empirical standpoint an open question. The measurement is made, but the association between concept and indicators, and then between indicators and consequences is not always clearly dened, nor clearly tested. The actual links between indicators of institutionalization and outcomes must be inferred, and cannot be simply assumed. In the original formulation of the concept MS claim that institutionalized party systems give citizens a way of understanding who is who in politics without needing to read all the ne print. However, parties are by no means the only way in which to ensure accountability some mechanism to reward and punish politicians. nor is there any guarantee that voters will not be shortchanged by parties that have deep roots in society. I talk about the former topic later in this text. With reference to the latter, while notorious cases such as Argentinas policy switch under Menem come to mind, the empirical point in made more generally in another paper presented to this conference: Campello (2008), building on the work of Stockton (2001) shows that partys roots in society measured as age of the parties does has no deterrent effect on policy switches in the face of an economic crisis. Granted, there exist empirical works that to attempt to explicitly link party system institutionalization or some of its components to the larger political outcomes. However, it is usually the case that very broad and sometimes questionable indicators of democratic quality and intensity are used. Stocktons (2001) examination of correlations between indicators of weak system institutionalization and Freedom House rankings, for example, nds non-linear relationships between institutionalization and the level of democracy. Thames & Robbins (2007) regress polity scores on electoral volatility to show an association of volatility was with lower quality of democracy. One important example of a better outcome indicator is the work of Zechmeister & Luna (2005), who show that party system institutionalization is positively associated to better representation. The outcome is measured through a very ingenious representation index based on survey data, but in this case institutionalization is measured by the empirically awed original index, and the association that is found is obtained through a simple correlation, without controls and with relatively few data points. Clearly, there is space for improvement.
6
The Brazilian Paradox
In his comprehensive book on Brazilian party systems, Mainwaring acknowledged that Brazilian parties do perform some important functions, an idea that conforms to the more general claim that in uid systems parties are important in some ways, but do not have the same structuring effect (Mainwaring 1999, p.23). It was already quite clear then that Brazilian parties were difcult to grasp, but recent developments have make this reality perhaps even more intriguing.
2.1
Volatility
The most objective indicator of party system institutionalization is volatility. This indicator captures what is perhaps the most essential notion of the idea of institutionalization both broadly dened and applied to party system: stability. This centrality, and the relative ease of measurement,4 makes for the eventual use of volatility as the measure of party system institutionalization (e.g. Thames & Robbins 2007). In this respect, there can be little doubt that the Brazilian party system has moved in the direction of more institutionalization, and, in fact, one is tempted to say that it is today much more institutionalized in this dimension than it was when of the return to democracy. The legislative electoral volatility (Figure 1(a)) have decreased to levels comparable to Western European democracies. It is important to keep in mind that in comparative terms Mainwaring & Torcal (2006) have pointed out that such a decline is very atypical (p.209), which suggests this is an interesting peculiarity, while reminding us of the perils of theorizing about an outlier. Volatility in presidential elections is still higher in absolute terms. This is true in most countries, and reects the fact that many of the main parties do not present candidates in every election. Still, presidential volatility levels have also shown a steep decline over time, most markedly between the 19994 and the 1998 election, and have remained relatively low ever since.5
Though in principle volatility should be a straightforward indicator, anybody who has attempted to systematically compile this indicator knows that there are many unspoken empirical calls to be made. 5 If one corrects volatility gures for shifting coalition patters, the decline is even greater.
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Figure 1: Electoral Volatility

Party mergers and splits, and presidential coalitions are accounted for in the corrected volatility gures.
2.2
Legitimacy:
As mentioned earlier in the text, the legitimacy component of party system institutionalization can refer both to the electoral process and to parties. Additionally, this legitimacy could be assessed both among political players, and the population at large. In Brazil, at least among elites, there is much consensus that representative democracies is the only game in town (Power 2000). For this matter Zechmeister & Luna (2005) also nd evidence that throughout Latin America there are less splits among elites than among the population in terms of the desirability of democracy. In the population, the electoral process in itself is seen as quite legitimate. Elections in Brazil are administered by a non partisan and professionalized branch of the judiciary, which maintains the voter registration rolls, runs elections, regulates and oversees all aspects of party activities, and solves legal disputes between involving parties and candidates. Since the mid nineties elections are fully electronic, and results are generally computed and announced within a few hours of polls closing. In the 2006 Latinobarometro, 65% of respondents expressed some or a lot of condence in the electoral court, the third highest percentage in the whole sample.6
6
The question was not asked in earlier editions of the survey.
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Figure 2: Legitimacy of Parties

Source: Latinobarometro 19952006
In terms of the legitimacy of parties, longitudinal indicators suggest that there has been very little change over the past ten years. Latinobarometro data show that both the share of respondents reporting some or a lot of trust in parties, and the share that think that parties are essential to democracy has been quite stable. A surprisingly large share of respondents agree with the second of these statements, and even more surprisingly, in 2001, the only year that the Latinobarometro asked simply whether parties are necessary, a whopping 71% of the respondents answered yes the second highest rate in the whole sample.
2.3
Organization:
The organizational structure of parties is by far the dimension of party system institutionalization that has had more indicators suggested though not necessarily operationalized. In this respect, the PT stands out form the rest in most indicators. Forged in the opposition, an partly out of necessity, the PT learned to generate its own resources (not least by taxing its own political appointees) and invested in the value of its label by enforcing discipline and purity. The PT also institutionalized elections of party ofcials and, in some cases, of candidates. Since reaching power at the national level the party has stood head an shoulders above the others in terms of resources and infra-structure, even though the PMDB is still the party with greater
9
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20 DEM|PFL PTB PPB|PP PDT PTB PPB|PP PMDB PMDB PSDB PSDB PDT PT PT
(a) Presented Candidate
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Figure 3: Local Presence of Main Parties

Data was obtained from the National Electoral Court (TSE). Municipal election data for elections prior to 1996 is patchy. Coalition data is only available from 2000 onwards.
local presence in the country as whole. While not as organized as the PT, most other main parties have also proved to be greater than their original leaders and founders and survived at least one change in leadership. Electoral rules allow parties to present at least 1.5 times more candidates than seats in dispute, so space on the ballot is not a scarce resource. The presidential ballot is another matter, and the object of to strategic interactions between groups within the parties. Still, parties have survived internal struggles for nomination. In the legislative arena is where Brazilian parties are most organized, and this, to a large extent, has to do with internal rules that confer a great deal of procedural power to party leaders (Figueiredo & Limongi 2002). While this does not necessarily trickle down to electorate, it helps stabilize interactions between parties. I will turn to this in more detail in the discussion of governability. Other quantitative indicators for party organizational levels include the local presence of parties and party switching. In Figure 3, I show the proportion of municipalities in which
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0 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
Figure 4: Party Switching by Legislators

Figure shows total number of legislators that switch parties at least once during the calendar year.
parties contest municipal elections.7 While the number of mayoral candidates presented almost all the major parties has actually declined (Figure 3(a)), the parties have made themselves present in more municipalities through coalitions (Figure 3(b)). Since in order to be part of a coalition at the municipal level the party needs at least a formal local ofce, the latter is a good measure of local level presence. In this respect, today there is markedly very little variation among the main parties, with most of them present in one way or another in close to 80% of the municipalities. Party switching by legislators shows no discernible trend, and continues to be an important source of uidity in the party system. In this respect, in March 2008 the Supreme Court ruled in abstract that the mandates belong to parties a and not to legislators, and upheld the decision in a concrete case in November. Parties have brought hundreds of law suits against elected politicians at all levels, and Congress is currently considering new legislation that would limit the effect of the courts ruling by means of the creation of a window in which switching would be allow. It is still not clear what will be the overall effects of this change, but in all likelihood some limitation to party switching will be imposed.
The total number of municipalities has varied in the period for which there is data from just under 5000 to 5500.
7
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Age of main parties Divergence
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60 0 5 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006
80 0 20
Figure 5: Average Party Ages and Voting Divergence

Values for age are somewhat different from those presented in Mainwaring & Scully (1995) for I considered the PDS/PPR/PPB/PP as a successor to the ARENA, and used all parties that received more than 4% of the legislative vote. Divergence is simply the sum of the differences (in percentage points) between the presidential candidates party/coalition performance in presidential and legislative elections. Legislative results for 1990 are in comparison to the 1989 presidential election. From 1994 onwards, elections were concurrent.
2.4
Roots in society: The physiology of hydroponic parties
In the original formulation of party system institutionalization, parties roots in society were proxied by measures of the age of parties and voting congruence in executive and legislative elections. Later, in Mainwaring & Torcal (2006), party identication data was also used, and so was the presence of outsiders. In this section, I present some detailed data related to both these sets of indicators. However, I consider the presence of outsiders as an outcome of low institutionalization rather than an indicator, and it is discussed as such in Section 3. With respect to the original indicators, the Brazilian party system has shown a vegetative increase in the age of parties. Given the steep decrease in volatility levels shown in the preceding paragraphs, it is by no means surprising that the average age of the main parties has increased at a pace of close to one per year. With respect to congruence between executive and legislative success of parties, we see a much more erratic behavior of the indicator, and this is true even after accounting for the coalitions that are formed at the presidential level. Again, considering that legislative elections have shown little volatility, and that volatility levels for presidential elections are much higher, this result is also not too surprising. It suggests simply
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Percentages
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40
Table 2: Rank Ordering of Parties from Left to Right

Year 1990 1993 1997 2001 2005 PDC PFL PDS PRN PT PL PC do B PSB PPS PDT PSDB PMDB PP PTB PPR PRN PSTU PFL PC do B PT PCB PSB PDT PSDB PMDB PTB PL PC do B PT PSB PPS PDT PMDB PSDB PTB PL PFL PPB PC do B PT PSB PDT PPS PC do B PSB PT PL PFL PPB PTB PTB PFL PPS PDT PMDB PSDB PL PP PMDB PSDB
Notes: Table is reproduced from Power & Zucco Jr. (2009) denotes parties that no longer exist. Stacked parties, in any given year, indicate that the differences between their respective estimated positions are not signicant at the 0.05 level. The signicance test of the differences between all other adjacent parties has a p-value of < 0.05.
that presidential elections are relatively detached from legislative elections, which is the rst hint that the edgling stability of the Brazilian political system rests on the coexistence of two distinct electoral dynamics. I return to this topic later in the text. The analysis of partisan roots in society starts to get really interesting as one digs into data on ideology, party identication and behavior. Among political elites, Power & Zucco Jr. (2009) have used survey data to show that there exists a common and shared ideological structure in the Brazilian party system, which has been quite stable over the course of the past 20 years (Table 2). Despite this structure, and despite the increased stability of voting patterns I show in the rest of this section that there has been no increase in the ideological structure of party competition in the electorate. Brazilian parties, in short, could be called hydroponic parties, as some proto-roots exist, but are not xed to anything solid. In an institutionalized party system, most voters identify with a party and vote with it most of the time (Mainwaring & Torcal 2006). The exact meaning of the word most in the sentence above can only be determined comparatively, but the levels found in Brazil hoover around 45% of the electorate. This is not as low as many could expect, especially considering that the survey questions were all open-ended, but as Mainwaring pointed out these gures might overstate actual identication, as in a very volatile environment the notion of identication itself loses its meaning of a long standing party allegiance and becomes much more shaped by recent events. Still, two commentaries are due: In the long run, uctuation is not too erratic and reported party identication does not seem to increase substantially close to elections, except
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for Collors PRN in 1990. The data in Table 3 show that since the mid to late nineties, the PT overtook the PMDB the party of redemocratization as the most popular party in the country. Table 3: Party Identication: Selected Parties, 19892006
N 2002 11534 12079 19797 13438 2791 2921 16415 2607 2558 7018 2480 2083 Total ID 42.1 46.0 39.9 42.0 47.1 42.4 44.6 41.2 49.4 53.8 52.0 43.9 40.2 PT 19.9 15.7 15.4 13.0 13.3 12.7 13.6 12.5 13.6 13.9 12.5 9.2 6.6 PMDB 5.3 12.1 10.2 11.7 15.7 13.4 16.4 13.1 19.4 18.2 19.1 10.2 13.0 PSDB 7.5 3.3 3.0 4.5 4.7 3.9 3.3 5.6 2.3 2.1 1.8 2.0 1.0 PDT 1.8 3.2 2.6 2.3 3.0 2.8 2.9 2.7 3.3 4.1 4.4 3.9 4.6 PFL 2.2 5.6 4.4 5.0 5.3 4.4 3.4 2.8 4.4 5.5 3.6 3.6 4.2 PTB 0.6 1.9 1.2 1.1 1.5 1.4 0.7 0.6 0.8 1.4 1.8 0.8 0.6 PPB 0.0 1.1 1.0 1.9 1.0 1.6 1.2 0.8 3.4 5.5 4.3 4.7 4.8 PRN 0.1 0.0 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.6 1.2 7.5 2.7
2006 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989
o seu Notes: All but the 2006 surveys were done by Data Folha and asked the open ended question: Qual e partido pol tico de prefer encia?. The 2006 survey was done by Ibope, and asked rst whether O(a) sr(a) tem prefer encia ou simpatia por algum partido pol tico ou n ao?, and if yes, which party.
Do Brazilian parties represent distinct socio-economic groups? Figure 6 reports the predicted probabilities that a respondent identies with one of the main parties, as generated by a multinomial logit regression that controls for other individual and regional characteristics.8 The rst thing to note is that in all but the last survey, the share of respondents reporting no identication declines with income, and indication that in Brazil there are not mass parties. In the earlier years the PTs support was always lower among the lowest income groups. Some surveys also show a slight decline in the probability of identifying with the PTs as we move from the middle income brackets to the highest ones. It is interesting to note that equivalent results for education (Figure 7) show that the until 2002, PTs support increased monotonically with years of schooling. This combination of support among highly educated and mid-range income voters points towards a very typical middle-class base of support for the party.
The dependent variable included categories for the PT, PSDB, PMDB and the fourth major party in each survey, plus a category for no party ID and a residual category for other parties. Independent variables included sex, age, type, and size of municipality, if available. Regressions were ran separately for in each survey.
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Figure 6: Income and Party Identication
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As of yet, I was not able to obtain surveys for the period between 2002 and 2006, the years of Lulas rst term, but the 2006 data show an important change in this socio-economic base. Identication with the PT now decreases with education and income, a result to which I will return in a few paragraphs. This result should be taken with a grain of salt, as the 2006 survey was conducted by a different pollster (IBOPE), and has a different question wording. However, the change in identication with the PT is compatible with case studies that analyze electoral results from the 2006 elections (Hunter & Power 2007, Nicolau & Peixoto 2007, Zucco Jr. 2008). The PMDB maintains substantially more support among voters with little education, but relative to income its support shifted from being poor-heavy to reasonably at. The PSDB, on the other hand, has relatively more support among the better off and among the well educated, and in 2006 it almost matched the PT for identication in both high end categories. Other parties have too low identication percentages for any meaningful inference, and overall, there the lack of structure is striking. Intriguingly, considering these results, party identication is not without consequences. Figure 8 reports the predicted probabilities of a positive evaluation of the president as a function of party identication. Results are shown for respondents that identify with the presidents party, with the main opposition party, and with no party or some other party. Despite considerable variation on the presidents evaluations, those that identify with the presidents party always rate him better than the neutral folks, which in turn rate the president better than the partisans of the opposition. Moreover, differences between the groups are signicant in all years for which there is data, except for the evaluation of Itamar Franco in 1993. This is probably due to the fact that though I have coded Franco as being in the PMDB, he only joined the party after leaving the presidency, and was not afliated with any party during his time in ofce. Voting intention data (Figure 9) reinforce the socio-economic shift in the PTs support base, which is even more pronounced with respect to voting than it is with respect to party identication. It is particularly interesting to note that in the 1994, 1998 and 2002 elections voting intention for the main candidates were quite at in income, denoting very little class polarization. Income was quite relevant in 1989, and particularly relevant in 2006, and it is interesting were quite the similar pattern in the vote intention for Lulas 2006 and Collor 1989. Figure 10 shows that for those that identify with one of the two main parties, the probability of voting for that partys candidate is quite high, and these levels are between two and three
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Figure 7: Education and Party Identication
17
government 0.8
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0.0 1990
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1992
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Figure 8: Positive Evaluation of the President given Party ID

Figure shows the predicted probabilities of rating the government as good or very good, given that one self identies with the presidents party, with the main opposition party, or with some other or no party. Probabilities were estimated using a logit regression of positive evaluation on party ID, income, age, sex and type of municipality. Predicted probabilities were obtained by holding other variables at their modal category. There are not enough identiers with the presidents party in 1991 and 1992 to estimate these probabilities.
2006
18
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Figure 9: Income and Voting Intention

Figure shows the predicted probabilities of voter intentions on the three main presidential candidates, for different income levels. Probabilities were estimated using a multinomial logit regression of voting intention on income, age, sex and type of municipality. Predicted probabilities were obtained by holding other variables at their modal category.
19
1.0
PT 0.8
Probability of Voting Party ID Candidate
PSDB
0.0 1989
0.2
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2006
Figure 10: Voting Intention given Party ID

Figure shows the predicted probabilities of voting for the party that one self identies with. Probabilities were estimated using a multinomial logit regression of voting intention on party ID, income, age, sex and type of municipality. Predicted probabilities were obtained by holding other variables at their modal category. Results are only shown for PSDB and PT, but other main parties were included in the analysis.
times higher than the probability of a non-identier voting for the same candidates.9 While this suggests that party identication, at least for those that have it, is strongly attached to voting, one must keep in mind that voters that identify with the PT or the PSDB never add up to more than 30% of the electorate. It is also the case that the link between party identication and voting, on one hand, and ideology, on the other, is much murkier. For this analysis I look at surveys that asked ideological self placements questions, and if available, questions of ideological placement of parties and candidates. What can we make of these positions? Table 4 suggests that not much. One concern with such data is that ideological scales might not have the same meaning to different people. Hence, Aldrich & McKelvey (1977) proposed a technique to rescale these data to account for idiosyncratic use of the answer scale. Interestingly, for the task at hand, from this technique we
For the analyses involving voting intention, I used only surveys taken very close to the election, which predict very well the actual election results.
9
20
can extract measures of how well respondents answers t the one dimensional policy space. The evidence is that most voters do not really know what they are answering, when it comes to left-right placement. The R2 of the spacial model is always much lower among the electorate than among elites,10 denoting that left-right placements are not too meaningful in the former group. The share of respondents that seem to see the scale reversed, which is all but nonexistent among elites, is reasonably high among voters. Moreover, there is no discernible trend the meaning of the ideological scale in the population, and the correspondence between elite and popular perception of parties position (delity) has if anything decreased. Table 4: Consistency of Ideological Placement Answers
Population Surveys Year R2 Reversed 2006 0.62 0.35 2002 0.49 0.28 2000 0.40 0.29 1989 0.60 0.24 Elite Surveys R2 Reversed 0.79 0.02 0.85 0.00 0.85 0.00 0.90 0.00 Fidelity 0.58 0.65 0.70 0.77
2006 2002 2000 1989
Year 2005 2001 2001 1990
Only surveys that asked respondents to place themselves and parties and/or candidates on a left-right scale were used. The R2 reects the t of a one dimensional spacial model that allows for respondent scale effects, and Reversed denotes the share of respondents that seem to reverse the ideological scale. Fidelity is the level or congruence between elite and population rescaled placements of parties and candidates.
The gures are even more startling if one looks at the predicted probabilities of identifying with a party given ideology. This is analogous to the measure computed by Mainwaring & Torcal (2006) except that it relied on a multinomial logit for identication with all the main parties instead of logits between pairs of parties. Using the rescaled self placements, the changes in the predicted probability of identifying when one allows ideology to vary from the rst to the fourth quintile of the distribution is never signicant for any party. It was only possible to estimate this model for surveys in 2000, 2002 and 2006 because no other surveys had asked simultaneously the party ID question, the ideological self placement, and the placement of other parties and candidates that is necessary to perform the rescaling. Still, if one looks at the possibly misleading raw self placements (which are available for a larger set of surveys), the gures are not too different. In 2006 variations in ideology had a signicant effect on the probability of identifying with the PT, but this was in the wrong direction. The 2002 surveys capture no
Figures for elites were computed from surveys carried out by Timothy Powers. See Power & Zucco Jr. (2009) for details.
10
21
Table 5: Predicted Party ID Given Ideology

Survey 2006 2002 2000 1993 1990 1989 Raw Self Placements Left more likely Right more likely PSDB PMDB, PT PMDB PT, PSDB, PFL PT,PMDB,PSDB,PFL PSDB PT,PDT PMDB, PFL PT,PDS PRN,PMDB PMDB,PDS PT,PFL Rescaled Self Placements Left more likely Right more likely PT, PMDB, PSDB PMDB PSDB, PFL, PT PFL, PMDB, PT
The Table reects whether respondents that place themselves on the right or on the left of the ideological scale have higher predicted probabilities of identifying with each party. Probabilities were estimated using a multinomial logit regression of party ID on ideological self placements. For the raw self placement scores, predicted probabilities were then simulated for a respondents on the middle of the left side of the scale, and for those on the middle of the right side of the scale. For the rescaled self placements, simulations were made for voters on the second and ninth deciles of all respondents. Scale varies from survey to survey.
effects. The 2000 Data Folha survey nds signicant effects for all parties, but for that it is by far the largest survey (20 thousand respondents), and the effects disappear in the rescaled data. Results for 1993, 1990 and 1989 are mostly in the correct direction, but are not always signicant. If anything, ideology was more pronounced in the 90s that it is today. Voting and Ideology This picture is completed by examining the effects of ideology on voting decision. A direct measurement of this effect is only possible for the 1989, 2002 and 2006 elections, which are the only years in which surveys close to elections asked both voting intention and ideological self placement, but the results are nonetheless interesting. As with other indicators, the 2006 data show an considerable departure from trends that were typical during most of the period. While the probability of voting for Lula was traditionally higher among those that self identied as left, this situation changed dramatically once the PT became the incumbent party. And what is even more striking is the fact that the PSDB also switched from having greater support among voters self classied as right. The ideological confusion in 2006 is such, that even the extreme leftist Helo sa Helena shows at support across the ideological scale. It is worth mentioning that there is a potential selection problem that was not dealt with in the analysis, as in 2006 Lulas voters are disproportionately likely to not state an ideological position. My tentative interpretation of this phenomenon is that a large portion of Lulas new voters were poor and uninformed voters, which has added considerably noise to an already
22
0.8
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0.0 0.0 Left Right Left
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Figure 11: Ideology and Voting
Figure show the predicted probabilities of voting for the each of the main presidential candidates and a residual category others for different ideological selfplacements. Probabilities were estimated using a multinomial logit regression of voting intention on self-placement, income, age, sex and type of municipality. Predicted probabilities were obtained by holding other variables at their modal category.
23
tenuous ideological structure. To sum up this section, the Brazilian case illustrates the possibility of a rather paradoxical mix: Parties interact in a (increasingly) stable pattern, with not much evidence of signicant changes in the levels of party organization and legitimacy, and with very weak roots in society, be it in terms of links to classes or specic groups, be it in terms of clearly identiable ideological patterns. As Mainwaring astutely recognized, not only a social cleavages approach to parties and party systems does not seem to apply to Brazil, but Brazilian parties also clearly do not structure the electorate in ideological terms. Still, there is stability of outcomes.
The Outcomes
The running tally of the indicators of party system institutionalization is ambiguous. Patterns of competition between parties are clearly much more stable, the legitimacy of parties and the electoral process is not negligible, but has not changed much either. Party organizations seem to have become somewhat more structured. The most striking indicator of organizational weakness party switching still persists, but is being tackled as this paper is being written. However, despite this stability which has lead to a vegetative increase in the age of the main parties and a certain stability of the ideological alignments as perceived by elites (politicians), parties still lack effective roots in society. Levels of party identication in the electorate are not terribly low, but have given no sign of increasing. While identication to the main parties seems to have an effect on voting behavior, there are no clear ideological links between parties and the electorate. Moreover, parties do not seem to represent particular socio-economic groups, and there are signs that even the most institutionalized party in the country has undergone a considerable change in its constituency in the direction of a more diffuse and less ideologically conscious one. In other words, the PT has caught-all. If we think in terms of outcomes, however, worst case scenarios associated with low party system institutionalization have been averted. This is not to say that Brazil is close to an ideal democracy, but rather that in political terms the country today is better off than it was 20 years ago. There has been no paralysis: policy changes have been incrementally enacted throughout the period, and voters have regularly had legitimate chances to express their praise or frustrations against government. While seen as excessively permissive, the Brazilian electoral system allows all reasonably representative groups in society to have some access to congress. These
24
interests do not have organic links with most parties, but they are represented nonetheless. More importantly, there have been no coup threats since at least the middle of Sarneys government, there has been hardly any political violence in the country, and even during the rather traumatic impeachment proceedings, when millions went to the streets, there was no institutional rupture. The fact that regime stability is frequently taken for granted is itself strong evidence in support of a positive view of political outcomes. That all this was achieved without a clearly institutionalized party system raises important questions about the concept itself. The four dimensions of party system institutionalization, and their many indicators, tend to stress the electoral connections of parties. Perhaps as important as the above mentioned four dimensions in which the Brazilian parties generally score on the not institutionalized extreme of the scale, it is important look at these outcomes independently from the assessment of the indicators of institutionalization.
3.1
No more outsiders
The ability of outsiders to gain ofce can be thought of as a consequence of lack of party roots or of low legitimacy of parties as a means to achieve power. Though there is no indication that Brazilians are any more attached to specic parties now than 20 years ago, in terms of outcomes these are dimensions in which the Brazilian party system has changes the most. While the Collor episode is one of the most notorious cases of outsider presidential victory anywhere it was an isolated episode. In fact, Collors victory and his quick demise showed that even if outsiders win, and despite the considerable powers vested on the Brazilian presidency, one cannot govern above or against parties. Collor himself realized this an year and a half into his term, but by then it was too late. Figure 12 shows that the share of the vote captured by outsider candidates has been stable and low in the past four elections. I dened outsiders as those candidates whose coalition of support had received less than 4% of vote in the previous election. While this might seem as a rather restrictive denition of outsiders, in Brazils fragmented party system this is enough to make parties players in executive-legislative relations. This criteria includes obvious outsider candidates such as Collor, En eas, and Helo sa Helena, but also includes others whose outsider status is debatable but who lacked considerably party support, such as Ciro Gomes (PPS, 1998) and Antony Garotinho (PSB-PGT-PTC, 2002). If we were not to consider these candidates as outsiders, the downward trend would be even greater.
25
100
Outsiders PSDB + PT
Vote Share
20
40
60
80
1990
1994
1998
2002
2006
Figure 12: Presidential Vote Share: Outsiders vs. Large Parties Candidates
The criteria for considering a candidate an outsider was whether his/her party had received less than 4% of the of legislative vote share in the preceding elections.
More important than these gures, however, is that today, in Brazil, it is safe to say that anti-party candidates cannot win the presidency. This is not because voters are deeply attached to parties as was shown before but rather because of established practices in the political system. It is important to note that the institutional framework has not changed much since Collor was able to sneak in, but they are not particularly conducive to outsider success. Candidates have to belong to parties, and need to be afliated one year before elections take place. Quite importantly, TV and radio time both during campaigns and in non campaign periods cannot be bought, but rather it is allotted to parties on the base of their legislative contingents. The biggest difference from the Collor adventure is that parties have been interacting on a regular basis for twenty years. In terms of the presidential races, the PSDB and the PT have established themselves as the two electoral poles, while the PMDB, despite its capillarity and incomparable nation-wide structure, has played the role of swing party. Other mid-sized parties have alternated between aligning themselves with either pole or attempting solo runs. As Figure 12 also shows, the outcome has been of marked stability. In spite of relatively high volatility at the presidential level (shown above), the combined vote share of the PT and the PSDB has been constantly over 80% of the vote share in the rst round of the last four presidential elections. Nothing in this institutional framework prevents outsiders from breaking in. It is evidently
26
still possible, in principle, to create a party 18 months before the election, attract a reasonable number of legislators to this party in order to secure media time and a network of support throughout the country (as Collor did). However, the fact that all the relevant players interact in the legislature and in municipal elections (which are held two years into the presidential terms) confers much predictability to the system. Politicians careers are not completely independent of their parties. Parties control access to all important positions in the legislature and nominate their members to position in the government. A repeat of Collor would require too many actors to be risk taking, in an environment where politicians are extremely risk averse. It is not impossible (though not likely) that the PMDB could decide to launch a candidate of its now, nor is it impossible that PSB, PDT and some other mid sized party will, again, present Ciro Gomes as a candidate. It is even likely that Helo sa Helena will run again. But it is very unlikely that a presidential candidate will come from nowhere to be nominated by one of the established parties, and even more unlikely that such a candidate would mount a half-decent candidacy without the support of any of them. In practice, the largest parties today exert an oligopolistic control over the nomination process, and the internal balance of forces between the regional chapters of the main parties determines the choice of candidates and coalition partners. It can be said that at least among elites, there is a clear recognition that parties are the sole means to achieve power, and alliances are accepted as an essential part of government. Even if anti-party rhetoric won an election, no viable government would come out of it.
3.2
Governability
The difculty of amassing working legislative majorities, and the risks posed by the consequent paralysis are among some of the worst case scenarios that are sometimes linked to poorly institutionalized party systems. Mainwaring, in his analysis of outcomes of the Brazilian political process (Mainwaring 1999, Chap. 10) examines two specic outcomes both related to what I term governability: the enactment of stabilization policies and administrative reform. He cites seven independent variables as having particular impact on these two relevant outcomes of interest but only three of those independent variables can be considered attributes of the party system: fragmentation, ideological distance, and party discipline. The other four (symmetric bicameralism, detailed constitutions, federalism and legislative powers of the president) can be traced indirectly to the party system, but are not part of it.
27
Of the three party system variables, none is obviously related to the idea of party system institutionalization, to the outcomes, or both. Party system fragmentation has no necessary relationship to party system institutionalization, and even if it had, it is not clear as Mainwaring and others have suggested that more parties make it more difcult for the government to pass legislation. Empirically, coalition formation enables presidents everywhere to avert paralysis (Cheibub, Przeworski & Saiegh 2004, Amorim Neto 2006), and logically, it might very well be better for a president to face a few smaller opposition parties rather a single large one, and the number of parties can have very different effects depending on whether parties are disciplined or not, and on where they are located on the policy space (Zucco Jr. 2007). Polarization, it seems, is also not directly related to party system institutionalization, as it was one of the original Sartori dimensions, which institutionalization is meant to complement. Still, even if we assume that more institutionalized party systems are less polarized which is probably not empirically true this only really matters if legislator behave ideologically. This, as I shows elsewhere (Zucco Jr. 2009) is a big if, for despite the clear shared recognition among political elites in Brazil about what constitutes left and right, ideology has become a very weak predictor of legislative behavior in recent times. Finally, the effects of party discipline on the enactment of legislation are, as (Mainwaring 1999) himself pointed out, completely dependent on interactions with other variables. While it is assumed that more institutionalized party systems display greater discipline, one must be aware that if legislators are to be accountable to local constituencies, more discipline might be at odds with political representation. As an empirical matter, party discipline in the legislature is considerably higher than one would expect, and the Brazilian experiences shows that the party systems can be quite structured in the legislature without corresponding structure in the electorate (Figueiredo & Limongi 2002). Parties are important actors in the Brazilian legislature, and have contributed to the governability of the country despite lacking strong links to the electorate (and maybe because of that). The point here is simply that party system institutionalization does not have a direct link to governability. In fact, it might be cheaper and easier for the president to assemble coalitions if he can combine bargaining with parties and with individual legislators (Zucco Jr. 2007), the latter of which should not be possible in a perfectly institutionalized party system.
28
3.3
Accountability & Representation
We have seen that party identication has an impact on the evaluation of presidents and on voting behavior, but that it does not seem to be ideologically driven, nor too widespread in the population. This prevents accountability in its strongest form, such as a notion of programmatic accountability in which parties stand for a very specic set of policies, or committed to the specic interests of a certain groups in society. This strong version of accountability implies an idea not only of commitment certain policy goals, but to specic policy instruments. There also exists a much weaker, but not completely uninteresting notion of accountability that hinges on results. It has been recently referred to as accountability ex-post (Stokes 2001), and includes notions of retrospective evaluations of government by voters, or, simply put, economic voting. A theoretical case can be made that this is not really accountability, but rather as Mainwaring & Torcal (2006, p.218) suggest non-programmatic personalism. Still, the Brazilian case suggests that it has at least some capacity to foster stability in the political system, which is generally considered an exclusive attribute of the stronger type of representation. The few data points (only ve elections) prevent us from performing a direct test of economic voting, but one way around this is to compute the effect of economic conditions on presidential job evaluations, and then test how much the single variable evaluations affects voting outcomes. To this end, I have compiled a relatively long series of comparable presidential job evaluations taken between 1989 and 2008.11 The basic model is inspired on Hibbss (2000), and includes as independent variables ination in the twelve months prior to the observation, a weighted average of the growth rate in the same period, a dummy indicating the presence of a political scandal, a dummy indicating which pollster collected the data point, and two terms allowing for a squared time effect. One additional complication is that during the rst year of Cardosos government, the cumulative ination rate fell dramatically, so I account for this by estimating the effects of the economic variables in two different regimes, a hyperinationary and a normal one. For the sake os space and simplicity, results are reported only for the normal regime. I used a non-linear model that allowed for the simultaneous estimation of the coefcients and weights on growth, which
These results are reproduced from Amorim Neto & Zucco Jr. (2008). These are only aggregate averages for the whole country, so they do not allow for a tests at the individual levels, such as the one shown in Figure 8. The set consists of 186 observations of president job evaluation that span the period between May 1987 and September 2008 in irregular intervals. After keeping only one observation per month, and discarding observations made in the rst few months of government which do not allow for the impact of recent economic conditions I was left with a total of 99 observations.
11
29
Table 6: Is it the Economy? Determinants of Popularity

DV. Popularity Growth 22.558 SE 5.633 p-value <0.001 Ination 10.365 3.356 0.003 Scandal 1.929 2.615 0.463 Pollster 0.952 1.958 0.628 Intercept 61.292 10.418 <0.001 N 99 R2 0.6
Notes: Regression includes a squared time term, and interaction between ination and an indicator variable for hyperination. Results are shown only for the normal ination regime.
indicate the rate on which past growth is discounted.12 This relatively simple model explains 60% of the variation on presidential job evaluations, with lower ination and higher growth having signicant impacts.13 In an exercise of statistical gymnastics due to few data points that is reported in Table 7, popularity almost alone is shown to account for close to 80% in the variation in the performance of the incumbent presidents party in national elections. Because of the interaction between popularity and the dummy indicator for presidential elections, effects of popularity on vote share in such elections are a combination of both coefcients. To facilitate interpretation, this net effect is reported along with the actual coefcients. Results show that residential popularity has only very marginal effects on legislative and municipal elections, but very strong effects on presidential elections. In a series of tests performed elsewhere using disaggregated results at the municipal level it can be shown that popularity has a larger effect in less developed regions of the country, which means that voters in these
The discount rate estimated in the non-linear model is 0.902, which implies that the previous quarters are discounted by 0.82, 0.68 and 0.59. Memory of growth fades considerably after six months. 13 In the hyperination regime (not reported), the effect of growth is larger the effect of ination is smaller
12
30
Table 7: Performance of the Presidents Party in National Elections

Mod. 1 Mod. 2 Vote Share Logit(Vote Share) 0.070 0.731 0.142 0.908 0.634 0.439 1.198 8.000 0.240 1.535 0.001 <0.001 0.161 1.615 0.092 0.590 0.111 0.021 0.184 1.415 0.065 0.412 0.017 0.006 14 14 0.828 0.781 Net Effect of Popularity on Presidential Elections 1.128 7.269 0.194 1.238 <0.001 <0.001
Popularity
SE p-value
Popular. Pres. Election
Pres. Election
Intercept
N R2
Estimate
SE p-value
31
regions are more likely to swing with the economy than those of more developed regions. This is yet another indicator of the existence of two different regimes of accountability governing presidential and legislative elections, a topic to which I return at the end of the paper. To sum up, the Brazilian party system is incapable of accountability in any sense that implies strong notions of representation, but there is evidence that at least presidents are held accountable for economic performance. Still, despite this limited connection with voters, the system does a decent job of avoiding gridlock, has grown resistant to anti-system politicians, and is successful in dealing peacefully with a wide range of policy demands.
Discussion
One country case says very little about the general relationships involving party system institutionalization. The relationship between more institutionalization and better outcomes, for instance, may very well exist as it has been shown to exist on average and across all polities even if it cannot be observed in a specic country study. With this important disclaimer in mind, what, if anything, can the Brazilian experience contribute to the understanding of party system institutionalization? The reconciliation of low levels of institutionalization with relatively stable and positive outcomes generates a few non-excluding points for reection. Change and not only levels of party system institutionalization might matter for political outcomes; party system institutionalization is not a necessary condition for the stability of political outcomes; stability of outcomes, while certainly not the ultimate goal, has some value in of itself; strong notions of representation are not guaranteed with stability, but require that parties have deeper roots in society. I tackle each point, and their possible implications, in turn, and close with a short digression on the possibility and desirability of stronger forms of representation. Levels vs. change: Democracies of the so called third wave are now all between fteen
and thirty years old, so we, as researchers, could start focusing attention in trends rather than just levels. We have theorized about possible consequences of party system institutionalization and it has be widely accepted that party systems can move up and down the institutionalization continuum, but we have hardly paid attention to the process of change. As I have argued in the paper, and summarize in the next paragraph, Brazil is a case of
32
stability with at best partial institutionalization, and without strong representation. We have no idea, however, whether this is a midpoint on the way to full institutionalization, whether it is a dead end, or even whether there are alternative paths. Research on the dynamics of change in party systems might help us understand this process much better. Non-institutionalized stability: Mainwaring & Torcal (2006) had the bases covered when
they noted that programmatic and ideological links are not the only means of stabilizing the party system, but rather that clientelistic and traditional/affective linkages can also have this effect (p.210). Still, the Brazilian case adds a few more options. It is hard to label the links between Brazilian parties and voters affective, or even clientelistic as there is nothing linking the partys machinerys to distribution of clientelistic goods. This is not to say that clientelism does not exist, but it tends to be a linkage between governments and voters, or between certain politicians and votes, but is not necessarily mediated through parties. Stability in the party system has taken hold with even more tenuous links between voters and parties. Where, then, does the stability come from? While of some importance to policy making, all indications are that legislators are not electorally accountable for overall performance of government. Results presented earlier corroborate this notion, as there is very little impact of presidential popularity on the legislative performance of parties, even though popularity is a direct function of the economy. The President is judged by policy outcomes, and legislators are judged by something else, which as Pereira & Muller (2003) suggest has more to do with promoting local interest and delivering or even attempting to deliver local benets. It is precisely this separation of purpose that opens space for trades between the executive and legislative branches, ensuring that policies can be enacted, and assuring governability. Hence, to some extent, one can say that it is precisely the lack of stronger ideological and programmatic linkages between parties and voters that has helped make the country governable. Were legislators more committed to particular policy instruments the highly fragmented political system would have made sure president had a much harder time passing legislation. Of course, if voters were more aware of the commitments of legislators, it could be the case that the political system would be less fragmented, and that the president would be awarded a working legislative majority. But that would be completely different equilibrium, and probably a completely different country.
33
The place of stability: Is this system any good? As Campello (2008) claims, and others in this seminar will surely argue, stability of the political system cannot be an end in itself. This paper aims to show simply that it is perfectly possible to achieve political stability without party system institutionalization. The limits of this situation, however, are clear: without roots in society, which is precisely the main weakness of the Brazilian party system, there cannot be representation in a strong sense. Hence, while institutionalization might very well not be a necessary condition for stability, it is a necessary condition for representation in a strong sense. Still, stability has a non-trivial value. Few would disagree that the main function of political institutions in general, and by extension of the party system, is to aggregate demands and diffuse conict in a peaceful way. These outcomes must not be ignored. If this is the state of the world, perhaps we should clarify what we mean by party system institutionalization. The idea of institutionalization in itself implies notions of routinized expectations and behavior, and as such, is very close to the idea of stability (Mainwaring & Torcal 2006). If by institutionalization of the party system we really mean stability, we need to know that it does not require all the dimensions of the original concept. If what we really care about is strong representation, we should say so, and focus on what leads to it. So what about roots? Where do party roots in society come from? The most plausible
source of roots in society is time combined with important political struggles over issues that are relevant to large groups of people. To start with, in Brazil there was no traumatic civil war to cement allegiances to parties, as in Uruguay or Colombia. More importantly, perhaps, though Brazil has had stints with democracy, none of the important political movements of the past that in other countries lead to long term commitments to parties, such as ghts against authoritarianism, campaigns for suffrage extension, or even the creation of mass entitlements, nd any echo or expression in current politics because the party system has been reshaped from above many times (Mainwaring 1999). The current party system has come a long way in twenty years, but twenty years is an awfully short period in historic terms. In a recent study, Dalton & Weldon (2007) nd that increasing partisanship in new democracies is a chicken-an-egg problem, as partisanship will strengthen in new democracies when there are stable democratic party systems, but stable democratic party systems are partially built on widespread partisanship (p.192). Brazil seems to have somehow solved part of the riddle, so time might very well do the rest.
34
Quite ironically, the PTs recent shift in constituency, though certainly a disruption of recent trends, makes perfect sense from the standpoint of the ideological alignment of voters. In a mix of virt` u and fortuna, the PT government has produced what are at least in the short term distinctively pro-poor political outcomes. Poverty alleviation programs have created the rst major entitlements since the Vargas era in the 30s, and these have at least the potential for inducing party allegiances. This story, however, has yet to be told. Trading stability for roots? Finally, I would like to end with a short digression into what
is an important case of reference. While we tend to think of Western Europe as ideal types of party systems, the (North) American case is probably more informative, as it emerged in institutional framework that is much more similar to Brazil than most European cases. During most of the 20th Century, the American party system was criticized for offering too similar options with parties that lacked clear differentiation and programmatic content. The consequence was disenchantment, apathy, and declining levels of party identication levels in the electorate (Fiorina & Abrams 2008). Since the early 70s, and in a much more pronounced manner in the 80s and 90s, party polarization has increased dramatically at least at the elite levels. This example is specially noteworthy because it is not the case that the electorate has become more polarized, but rather simply that there has been increased sorting by income, both in terms of party identication and voting behavior (McCarty, Poole & Rosenthal 2006). Polarization on moral values, a common explanation for increased level of conict and bitterness in American Politics, has been all but ruled out by the academic literature (Fiorina & Abrams 2008, McCarty, Poole & Rosenthal 2006, Layman, Carsey & Horowitz 2006). Rather, it is increasingly the case that poor voters favor Democrats while rich ones favor Republicans, and these differences are quite in line with the overall redistributive effects of Republican and Democratic governments, as has been comprehensively shown in Bartels (2008). Polarization in the elite level has reached the point that there is no more ideological overlap between the members of either of the two main parties, with Liberal becoming a synonym for Democrats, and Conservative a synonym for Republican. Parties are now indisputably much better vehicles for ideas and policies, and have much stronger ties to distinct socio-economic constituencies than any time in the recent past. Given the previous situation of lack of differentiation between parties, it is interesting to note that the current turn of events has elicited criticism and concern than praise (Fiorina & Abrams 2008).
35
So much so that McCarty, Poole & Rosenthal nish their book on polarization stating that they nd this trend deeply disturbing, and hope moderation returns before serious cracks in our institutions occur. (McCarty, Poole & Rosenthal 2006, p.203). Too much partisanship can be as much a curse as it is considered a blessing.
References
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Stability Without Roots: Party System Institutionalization in Brazil

Cesar Zucco Instituto Universit ario de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro czucco@iuperj.br

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

The Concept of Party System Institutionalization

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Table 1: What is Party System Institutionalization?

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

The Brazilian Paradox

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Simple Volatility Corrected Volatility

Simple Volatility Corrected Volatility

(a) Legislative Elections

(b) Presidential Elections

Figure 1: Electoral Volatility

The question was not asked in earlier editions of the survey.

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Figure 2: Legitimacy of Parties

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

1996 2000 2004 2008

(a) Presented Candidate

(b) Part of Coalition

Figure 3: Local Presence of Main Parties

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Figure 4: Party Switching by Legislators

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Age of main parties Divergence

60 0 5 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006

Figure 5: Average Party Ages and Voting Divergence

Roots in society: The physiology of hydroponic parties

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Table 2: Rank Ordering of Parties from Left to Right

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Predicted Probability of Identifying

Predicted Probability of Identifying

Predicted Probability of Identifying

pmdb pt pmdb psdb 0.0 pfl pfl

0510 sm Income Level

0305 sm 0510 sm Income Level

Predicted Probability of Identifying

Predicted Probability of Identifying

Predicted Probability of Identifying

pmdb pt psdb pfl 0.0 0.0

Predicted Probability of Identifying

Predicted Probability of Identifying

Predicted Probability of Identifying

pds pfl 0.0 0.0

1020+ sm Income Level

1020+ sm Income Level

0510 sm Income Level

Predicted Probability of Identifying

Predicted Probability of Identifying

Predicted Probability of Identifying

pdt pds 0.0

1020+ sm Income Level

0510 sm Income Level

0510 sm Income Level

Figure 6: Income and Party Identication

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008

Draft (Do not cite): November 16, 2008