Inequality and Party-Based Democracy: Evidence from Brazilian Municipalities

• In Event: Latin American Political Institutions

Abstract

In many cases, politicians seek and exercise power in a personalist manner, dispensing with party organizations and relying more strongly on their personal attributes. It is puzzling that they do so because a party-based political strategy is supposedly an efficient way to make democracy work for both politicians and voters. This paper asks about the structural conditions under which inefficient personalist patterns of electoral competition emerge and consolidate. Under what conditions do personalist politicians come to predominate? Conversely, where and why do we observe party-based democracy? In other words, the paper moves the political-economic debate from "why parties" to "when parties".
I single out economic inequality as a structural condition that shapes the party-basedness of political competition. In more unequal societies, few resource-rich individuals have access to enormous wealth and other resources that they can use as substitutes to the resources found within political parties. Similarly, because party platforms tend to, in varying degrees, cater to the preferences of the median voter, resource-rich politicians’ preferences are farther away from the optimal party platforms. This leads to an “elites against parties” scenario in which resource-rich individuals deliberately pursue personalist political strategies, undermining the consolidation of a party-based democracy. Inequality, thus, breeds personalism.
I test this theory through the analysis of political competition in Brazilian municipalities since 1945. I introduce both a new dataset of electoral results covering 50 new years of electoral competition across Brazil and an updated measure of long-run land-based inequality based on soil suitability. Taking advantage of these data, I demonstrate a negative association between inequality levels and party system development across Brazil since 1945. Where inequality is higher, politicians historically follow more personalist strategies and party systems tend to be substantially more fragmented.

Author

• Fernando Bizzarro Neto, Harvard University