Why Party Organization Still Matters: The Workers Party in Northeastern Brazil

Does party organization still matter? Much of the party literature suggests that politicians, who can use substitutes like mass media to win votes, lack incentives to invest in party organization. Yet it remains an electoral asset, especially at lower levels of government. Evidence from Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT) indicates that party elites invest in organization when they prioritize lower-level elections and that this investment delivers electoral returns. In the mid-2000s, the PT strengthened its support across levels of government in the conservative, clientelistic Northeast. Drawing from underutilized data on party offices, this article shows that organizational expansion contributed substantially to the PT’s electoral advances in the Northeast. While President Lula da Silva’s (PT) 2006 electoral spike in the Northeast resulted from expanded conditional cash transfers, the PT’s improvement at lower levels followed from top-down organization building. The PT national leadership deliberately expanded the party’s local infrastructure to deliver electoral gains. I party organization becoming irrelevant to electoral politics? Much of the current party literature suggests that in Latin America and other regions, contemporary politicians increasingly lack electoral incentives to invest in party organization because they can use less time-consuming and labor-intensive party substitutes, especially mass media, to win elections (Katz 1990; Landi 1995; Scarrow 1996; Mainwaring 1999; Levitsky and Cameron 2003; Hale 2006). This article challenges that view, arguing that local party infrastructure remains an important electoral asset for vote-seeking elites. Specifically, it emphasizes that in lower-level elections, where candidates do not need national or large subnational constituencies to win, party organization plays a key role; and lower-level elites, as well as major national parties whose leaders prioritize lower-level elections, therefore retain incentives to invest in party infrastructure.1 To support this argument, the article presents evidence on the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the programmatic, center-left PT was elected to the Brazilian presidency in 2002 and re-elected in 2006. Between 2002 and 2006, his vote share stagnated or decreased in most of Brazil but skyrocketed in the traditionally conservative and clientelistic Northeast region, home to over a fourth of the national population. Lula’s spike in the Northeast (henceforth NE) garnered much scholarly attention, but an important, simultaneous development © 2014 University of Miami DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-2456.2014.00229.x Brandon Van Dyck is an assistant professor of government and law at Lafayette College. [email protected] went largely unnoticed: from the early to mid-2000s, at all levels of government, the PT improved more in the NE than nationally. Lula’s spike resulted primarily from Bolsa Família (BF), a federal conditional cash transfer program implemented between the 2002 and 2006 elections that disproportionately benefited poor northeastern families. Northeastern beneficiaries and supporters of BF, however, overwhelmingly identified the program with Lula, not with the PT (Samuels 2006; Hunter and Power 2007; Zucco 2008; Figueiredo and Hidalgo 2009; Singer 2009; Borges 2011). This article thus raises and examines the puzzle, what factors contributed to the PT’s electoral improvement in the NE— as distinct from Lula’s—during the early to mid-2000s? The article demonstrates that local organization building, initiated and directed by the PT’s national office (Diretório Nacional), played a key role. Since the PT’s inception, the national party leadership has put a premium on grassroots organization building and has used its campaign infrastructure, brand, and financial resources to recruit members and stimulate the formation of permanent local party offices (Keck 1992). In the early 2000s, this trend continued. Capitalizing on a spike in party finances, a strengthening party label, and a national campaign infrastructure (all associated with the 2002 election preparations and aftermath), the PT national office set out to expand the PT’s membership base and local branch network and devoted considerable resources to this purpose. Through these efforts, the national leadership sought, in large part, to improve the PT’s performance in lowerlevel elections across Brazil. The national office focused disproportionately on the NE, a region of historical weakness for the PT, both organizationally and electorally (Ribeiro 2010). Drawing from underutilized data, this article will demonstrate a strong and robust empirical relationship between the PT’s organizational expansion and lower-level vote share improvement in northeastern municipalities from the early to mid-2000s. The article is organized in three main sections. The first section challenges the frequently expressed view that with increased access to mass media and other party substitutes, contemporary politicians lack electoral incentives to invest in party organization. It emphasizes that party organization can make a key difference in lower-level elections and that elites who seek lower-level electoral success therefore have incentives to invest in local infrastructure. The second section presents the empirical puzzle and hypothesis. Why, from the early to the mid-2000s, did the PT’s electoral performance, across levels of government, improve more in the Northeast than in Brazil as a whole? This section first presents evidence that the conditional cash transfer program, Bolsa Família, does not correlate systematically with the lower-level PT’s vote share change in the NE from the early to mid-2000s. Then it shows that during the early 2000s, the PT national leadership, in order to achieve greater electoral success at lower levels of government, invested heavily in organization building across Brazil, disproportionately in the NE. It hypothesizes that the PT’s organizational expansion systematically correlates with increased electoral support for the lower-level PT in the NE from the early to mid-2000s. The third section confirms the hypothesis with 2 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 56: 2