Title: Descriptive Representation and Party Building: Evidence from Municipal Governments in Brazil

INTRODUCTION

Decentralization combined with local democracy has heralded a new era of democratic politics in low- and middle-income countries. Coined as “democracy’s quiet revolution,” these twin reforms have been profound in their reach and in their capacity to shift power from central to local authorities. This quiet revolution has enabled progress on two democratic ideals: descriptive representation and party building. Research in gender and politics shows that descriptive representation enhances democracy by increasing women’s political participation (Desposato and Norrander 2009; Goyal 2023), enhancing substantive representation (Barnes 2016), and improving democratic legitimacy (Clayton, O’Brien, and Piscopo 2019; Hinojosa and Kittilson 2020). At the same time, research on political party development shows that local politics offers national party leaders a tool to screen for talent that will promote the party’s interest, while holding local office offers politicians’ resources to build parties’ territorial organization, paving the way for resilient parties, which are the bedrock of a stable democracy (Levitsky, Loxton, and Van Dyck 2016; Samuels 2003; Sells 2020; Van Dyck 2014).

This article contributes by highlighting a new dimension alongside which descriptive representation enhances democracy: grassroots party building. To establish this link, we offer a gendered theory of incumbency and party building. We theorize that parties retain and promote incumbents based on gendered criteria, incentivizing women to recruit new party members to forge viable political careers. These incentives emerge in two ways. First, parties select, retain, and promote female candidates (and members) who are party loyalists; party loyalists are more likely to invest in party building. Second, female incumbents are also more likely than men to depend on local politics as a pathway to power. Yet, at the same time, gendered inequalities inside party institutions disproportionately lower women’s access to the patronage required for recruitment. Women respond strategically to these constraints by recruiting women party members, as doing so lowers recruitment costs, is role-congruent, and eases credit claiming.

By highlighting the gendered incentives of party building, our theory yields additional expectations for the quality of women’s recruitment and provides us with downstream implications for party resilience. First, because women members are more likely to be party loyal than men members (and have fewer outside options), women’s recruitment as party members increases party resilience. Second, because women incumbents have lower access to patronage and their recruitment strategies are less contingent on patronage, they are more likely to recruit members (men or women) who are also less likely to join for particularistic reasons and, therefore, are less likely to switch or leave parties, which also increases party resilience.

We test these predictions in the context of the municipal government in Brazil. Several reasons make Brazil a near-ideal empirical site for our investigation. Brazil’s municipal governments enjoy considerable discretionary power over budgets and job allocation. As Samuels and Zucco (2016) point out, municipal executive positions are politically appealing and a pathway to both remaining viable in politics and continuing in higher-level politics. Brazil is also a substantively important case where there is substantial scope for party development and has recently experienced greater party consolidation (Levitsky, Loxton, and Van Dyck 2016). At the same time, Brazil has some of the highest gender gaps on women’s representation in Latin America, and research points to weakly institutionalized parties as a major cause of women’s underrepresentation (Wylie 2018). Our theory points to a resolution out of this bad equilibrium, which is particularly important in Brazil, where gender quotas have failed to improve women’s representation (Sacchet 2011).

Empirically, we used administrative data on the party membership of all parties in Brazil in the last two decades, from 2004 to 2020. This uniquely fine-grained dataset enables us to provide descriptives about the gender gap in party membership at scale, which are otherwise hard to study and limit the scale of investigation. Despite the importance of party activism in the politics of the Global South, there is little comparative research exploring the gender gaps in party activist recruitment. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first article to quantify the gender gap in party membership at scale using administrative data in any setting. While we discuss Brazil’s party activism in detail in our context section, we find a stark gender gap in party membership. Women make up roughly 40% of all party members, and this striking gender gap is similar in magnitude across all of Brazil’s major parties (and marginally stronger in less institutionalized or right-leaning parties). We also find that women party members are half as likely as men to switch or leave parties, suggesting that correcting for the gender imbalance in grassroots party membership can simultaneously increase party resilience, at least as measured on this singular dimension.

To identify the effect of women’s incumbency, we rely on a close-elections regression discontinuity design to overcome the selection bias of women mayors (s)electing into places that are more conducive to party building. By using this design, this article joins several other studies that have used the regression discontinuity design to identify incumbency effects and enhances knowledge accumulation (Boas and Hidalgo 2011; Brollo and Troiano 2016; Frey and Santarrosa 2022; Sells 2020). Investigating close races, we find that men and women incumbents are equally likely to increase party membership. In light of evidence demonstrating that women mayors have substantially fewer patronage and financial resources that are important to recruit party members in Brazil (Brollo and Troiano 2016), we interpret this as women incumbents’ either exerting more effort or using the limited available resources to recruit new party members, supporting our theory. In line with the main argument of our article, we find that women mayors lower the gender gap in party membership recruitment, while male mayors have no effect on the gender gap relative to their party being in the opposition. Utilizing party switching as our measure of the quality of new member recruitment, we find that women mayors recruit party members who are less likely to switch or leave parties. Finally, we show that women incumbents have a higher likelihood of being promoted and that these effects are stronger in municipalities that had lower baseline levels of women’s party membership and where women most strongly lower the gender gap in party membership. Investigating the electoral cycle of party building, we find that women lower the gender gap close to the final term year, where among other motivations, the incentives for signaling party building are stronger relative to initial years in office.

This article establishes the link between women’s incumbency and its gendered effects on party building. By establishing this link, we highlight a new dimension alongside which descriptive representation enhances democracy. We extend the research linking descriptive representation to enhanced substantive representation and political participation (Desposato and Norrander 2009; Htun 2016), and present a new possibility alongside which the costs and benefits of descriptive representation can be evaluated. By doing so, we also echo and contribute to a growing scholarship in comparative politics that draws on feminist institutionalist theory to illuminate how gender relations shape women’s behavior inside legislatures and in political parties (Barnes 2016; Clayton and Zetterberg 2021; Htun 2002; Kenny 2014; Krook and Mackay 2011; Sacchet 2011; Wylie 2018). We contribute to the research on the gender gap in political career progression (Folke and Rickne 2016; Goyal Forthcoming; Kerevel 2019; O’Brien 2015), by highlighting that party building can boost women’s chances of securing promotions and renominations.

Our findings are of interest to scholars of political party institutionalization and development (Bohlken 2016; Hicken and Kuhonta 2014; Mainwaring and Scully 1995), especially in Latin America (Hagopian, Gervasoni, and Moraes 2009; Levitsky, Loxton, and Van Dyck 2016; Sells 2020). Nearly four decades since the onset of the third wave, political parties remain weak in Latin America, and most new party building efforts have failed, hindering the prospects of a stable democracy. Our findings show that descriptive representation can enable parties to build territorial organizations and establish more durable partisan attachments, sowing the seeds for long-term party stability. Party stability is in turn crucial to economic growth and democratic stability (Bernhard et al. 2020; Bizzarro et al. 2018).

The Critical Role of Local Leadership in Party Building

Political parties are the basic building blocks of representative democracy, and as Schattschneider and Aldrich famously noted, democracy is “unthinkable” and “unworkable” without political parties. The experience in Africa, Latin America, and Asia shows that successful party building is challenging in new democracies but not altogether impossible (Hicken and Kuhonta 2014; Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Riedl 2014). The scholars of party organization conclude that one of the key elements of successful party building is the construction of a territorial organization and the recruitment of party members, which ensures that party leaders can rely on local political support (Levitsky, Loxton, and Van Dyck 2016). Territorial organization enables parties to win votes and build partisan attachments. Parties use grassroots members and party activists to communicate party brands, build ideological or patronage linkages, and organize rallies and ground campaigns to mobilize voters. Because party members are more likely to stick it out and remain loyal to their party regardless of its electoral success, parties with a strong grassroots activist support base often survive past electoral success and failure.

Yet successful party organizations are not built overnight. A rich literature on party organization in Latin America underscores that successful party building is a resource- and time-intensive responsibility that requires considerable effort on the part of local embedded actors (Levitsky, Loxton, and Van Dyck 2016; Van Dyck 2014). Party membership recruitment requires that local politicians and party functionaries engage actively in grassroots mobilization to forge citizen–party ties. Local leaders schedule neighborhood events such as town halls, plant and recycling drives, meetings, knocks on doors, and organizing transport and buses for party members to attend meetings. In Brazil, local party officials in the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores; The Worker’s Party) interviewed in Samuels and Zucco (2016, 345) note that, “If you don’t have local leaders who are willing to take on the job of organizing the party, there’s no way a DM [diretório municipal] will take root in that town.” Investigating the importance of local operatives in establishing the PT’s success in the North Eastern region of Brazil, Van Dyck (2014, 11) similarly concludes that, “To make electoral inroads in the NE, parties without strong local patron-client networks, like the PT, need local operatives who can travel deep into the interior, schedule events, hold meetings, claim credit for policies, and actively encourage individuals to support a candidate or ticket.” Personal interactions between candidates and voters have traditionally been crucial in Brazil, particularly at the local level, in growing party membership (Sacchet 2005).

In other Latin American settings, studying the relationship between slum dwellers and local political brokers in Argentina, Auyero (2000, 56) highlights the intricate grassroots processes of mobilization and problem-solving through which mayors and their affiliates, such as brokers and local party functionaries, organize citizens to attend party meetings. He highlights how the mayor relies on several local brokers, such as Norma, “Every month, at the party meetings, the mayor informs us [the brokers of the 140 UBs who usually attend the meeting] of the date when they are going to give out food at the municipality…We tell the neighbors.” Zarazaga (2014, 26) highlights the pyramidal and hierarchical structure through which mayors grow party membership in Argentina. “At the apex are the mayor and an inner circle of two or three people who help build and control the network; these usually include the municipal secretary of government and secretary of social development. Beneath them is a group of municipal delegates or council members who deal directly with the brokers.” Studies of grassroots recruitment in India and Ghana have discovered a similar pyramidal structure of party organization where local leaders are actively involved in growing the party membership base (Auerbach and Thachil 2018; Brierley and Nathan 2020).

Another way to understand the crucial and direct role of local leaders in expanding the party membership is to inquire of party members as to how they came to join parties. Despite the dearth of survey research that includes interviews with party members, a growing number of studies show that party members cite active party recruitment by local party leaders or their affiliates as one of the main reasons to join the party. Hardly a few citizens join parties on their own initiative but instead because they are asked to join a party. Conducting a survey of municipal party convention participants in the state of São Paulo in Brazil, Ribeiro (2015) finds that 74% of members were asked to join the party by another person,¹ while 11% joined due to their participation in a non-party organization such as a labor union or a neighborhood organization, and a mere 8% joined on their own initiative. Further highlighting how local incumbents can leverage their connections with bureaucrats, Frey and Santarrosa (2022) show that mayors in Brazil have an advantage in recruiting street-level bureaucrats into their parties. Outside of Brazil, Goyal (2023) conducts a representative survey with party activists in all major parties in Delhi, India, and shows that the majority of party activists credit active party recruitment as the reason for joining the party. Furthermore, they credit a local politician for connecting them to the party organization; hardly any women or men mention role model effects as a reason to join parties. In Ghana, Brierley and Nathan (2020) find that brokers in Ghana’s ruling party have significantly more upward ties to local elites than non-brokers, underscoring the top-down nature of their party membership.

Given the centrality of local leaders to growing party membership, decentralization and local democracy provide party leaders with a tool to build a robust territorial organization that increases their party’s odds of political survival. Studying local democracy worldwide, Bohlken (2016) finds that party building goals are a key explanation for why party leaders devolve power and extend local democracy in the first place. Party leaders (principals) would like local incumbents (agents)—who are imperfect party agents—to invest patronage and party resources in party building. At the same time, local incumbents are imperfect party agents who can divert these resources to serve their own ends, particularly in weakly institutionalized parties where ideological attachments and disciplining mechanisms are weak (Sells 2020; Van Dyck 2014), jeopardizing the party’s electoral and organizational survival (Novaes 2018).

To guard against this kind of opportunism, party leaders have many ways to lower agency costs, such as their power over re-nomination, promotion, patronage, ideology, norms, and other ways to keep discipline local leaders. Party leaders can use the information from local elections and campaigns to find out how much support there is for the party on the ground and to find talented people who want to help build the party. These tools are particularly effective with strong parties, as seen in many different settings. Sells (2020) explains that holding mayoral office bolsters party building in Brazil, but only in parties that are strongly institutionalized where party leaders have the capacity to discipline local incumbents. He finds that municipal incumbency increased membership recruitment only among centralized and programmatic parties that already had a strong territorial presence in the municipality, and it was ineffective for weaker parties.