Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans Voting Behavior in Brazil

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.

1. Introduction; 2. Partisanship and antipartisanship in Brazil; 3. The strength of partisan attitudes in Brazil; 4. The rise (and decline) of Petismo; 5. Partisanship, antipartisanship, and voting behavior; 6. Partisanship and antipartisanship in comparative perspective; 7. Parties, voters and Brazilian democracy; References; Index.

David J. Samuels received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1998. His book Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach (with Ben Ansell, Cambridge, 2014), won the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation award as well as the William H. Riker best book prize from the APSA's Political Economy Section. He is also the author of Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers (with Matthew Shugart, Cambridge, 2010), and Ambition, Federalism, and Legislative Politics in Brazil (Cambridge, 2003). He has received funding from the NSF (in 1996 and 1999) and the McKnight Foundation (in 2001), and was awarded Fulbright Fellowships in 2004 and 2013.
Cesar Zucco holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles (2007) and since 2013 he has taught politics and public policy at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro. He has published articles on legislative politics, elections, social policy, and political economy, focusing both on Brazil and on Latin America. His work has appeared in leading journals in political science and Latin American studies.