FRESH LOOK
matter, but their importance depends
on historical factors rather than on a
state’s level of economic development.
In Recife, a poor city in a poor state, a
candidate without political strength
won election simply because he was
affiliated with an electorally strong
party. In São Paulo it worked the other
way: anti-P T sentiments helped elect
a conservative candidate.
In Brazil, where partisanship is
weak, campaigns matter much more.
Overall, this book marries qualitative and quantitative methodologies
in a thorough but never boring treatment of local electoral processes. It
stands as a testament to the sophistication of Brazilian social science.
Its major weakness is the reliance
on cross-sectional rather than longitudinal survey data. Why is this important? Partisanship is hard to study
in Brazil because it changes over the
course of a political campaign. People reporting no partisan affiliations
at the beginning of a campaign come
to like a candidate and share that candidate’s party preference.
Thus Brazilian partisanship, unlike U.S. partisanship, can be endogenous. To analyze partisanship more
rigorously, scholars need to interview the same respondents at various
points during the campaign, measuring their changing partisan identification, their responses to campaign
messages and their evolving evaluations of political candidates.
These authors cannot be faulted for
relying on the data available to them,
but a complete analysis of partisanship
will require better (and more costly)
databases. Still, by emphasizing the
variety of local and state political processes, and by systematically linking
these subnational processes to broader
themes of national-level politics and
partisanship, Antonio Lavareda, Helcimara Telles and their colleagues have
made a major contribution to our understanding of Brazilian politics.
FIRST LOOK
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