Parties for Rent? Ambition, Ideology, and Party Switching in Brazil…pages.ucsd.edu › ~sdesposato...

Parties for Rent? Ambition, Ideology, and PartySwitching in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies

Scott W. Desposato University of California, San Diego

Party switching by legislators has been common in many countries, including the Philippines, Italy, Nepal, Ecuador, Russia,and Japan. While frequently dismissed as simply an indicator of a weak parties, switching provides a unique window onparty systems. To the extent that we understand affiliation decisions, we gain insight on the way politicians use parties toadvance their careers. In this article I offer a model of party-membership patterns, where decisions to switch party or tostay put are a function of the strategic interaction of legislators and endogenous party leaders. I test the model on the caseof Brazil, where switching is common. Results suggest that Brazilian legislators use parties to maximize pork, ideologicalconsistency, and short-term electoral success, but which of these matters most depends on constituents, i.e., legislators useparties for different purposes in different electoral environments. The approach developed here could easily be applied tostudy legislative behavior in other political systems.

Madison’s admonishments about the dangers offaction aside, most scholars agree that partiesare quite useful for the consolidation of effec-

tive and stable democracies. Political parties organize andaggregate social interests, consolidating lines of politicalconflict. They regularize democratic practices and serveas mechanisms for compromise and representation. Theydecrease voters’ information costs (especially in an en-vironment with many candidates) and increase govern-ments’ accountability to voters (Aldrich 1995; Cox andMcCubbins 1993; Snyder and Ting 2001). Scholars haveeven linked party systems’ characteristics to countries’economic policies (Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Johnsonand Crisp 2003; Mainwaring 1999)

While parties are useful for democracies, scholars ar-gue that parties are equally useful for ambitious politi-cians. During elections, parties can provide campaignworkers, financial support, and well-developed policybrand names. Parties can control access to desired ca-reer opportunities and may enhance politicians’ access togovernment pork.

Many countries, however, have party systems thatapparently provide few such benefits to polity or politi-cians. Parties in these systems are weakly institutionalized,

Scott Desposato is assistant professor of political science, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA([email protected]).

For their comments and suggestions, I thank Ben Bishin, Brian Crisp, Greg Johnson, David Karol, Kris Kanthak, Laura Langer, Mark HugoLopez, Bill Mishler, Pam Singh, Ben Smith, and Mike Thies. For excellent research assistance, I thank Moema Bonelli.

1See Carey and Shugart (1995); Bowler, Farrell, and Katz (1999); Ames (2001), and National Democratic Institute (1997).

very fluid, and highly volatile. They typically lack distinctideological platforms, have low discipline within legisla-tive delegations, and suffer volatile levels of popular sup-port. Given the important role parties play in shaping andstabilizing democratic political arenas, a key task for com-parative political scholars has been explaining the natureof party systems and suggesting mechanisms to strengthenthem.1

One oft-overlooked window on party systems isswitching by politicians. While switching is relatively rarein most countries, it has been common in many countries,including South Africa, Japan, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nepal,Russia, the Philippines, France, Italy, and Brazil. Such be-havior is usually dismissed as an indicator that “partiesdon’t matter,” but I argue that party switching warrantsstudy for at least three reasons.

First, frequent switching makes it clear that partiesdo matter—otherwise politicians would not bother toswitch. Second, and more importantly, switching providesa unique window on politicians’ underlying preferences,including their incentives for belonging to political par-ties. An examination of patterns of party affiliations canreveal the roles parties play in meeting politicians’ var-ied career challenges. This increases our understanding

American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 2006, Pp. 62–80

C©2006, Midwest Political Science Association ISSN 0092-5853

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of inchoate party systems; it also aids in the design ofparty-strengthening institutions. Finally, switching posesa normative problem for representation in mass democra-cies. Parties are the primary mechanism linking voters andpoliticians in modern mass democracies. Meaningful andstable party labels enable voters to make identify optimalcandidates and cast appropriate ballots. Party switching,however, violates the basic electoral pact and effectivelymakes party labels meaningless.

In this article I offer a model of party affiliations,where membership patterns are a function of the strate-gic interaction of individual legislators and political par-ties. Legislators try to maximize utility, a function of thepayoffs of membership in each party and their own at-tributes, less a transaction cost associated with switching.Parties invite, reject, or expel members to maximize theutility of a majority of their current members, a functionof exogenous and endogenous resource endowments.

I apply my model to the case of Brazil. I show thatpolitical institutions and mass attitudes combine to createa very fluid market for parties and legislators, consistentwith observed frequent switching. More than a third ofdeputies switch party during their terms, some as manyas seven times. Brazilian parties’ lack of cohesion andstability has earned them the label of “party for rent”and inspired Sartori (1993) to call Brazil, “the anti-partysystem.”

The empirical results are consistent with theoreticalpredictions and offer several insights about the Brazil-ian party system. The strongest motives for party affil-iation are access to distributive resources, electoral op-portunities, and compatible policy positions, but which ismost important varies with voters’ characteristics. In less-developed electoral environments, legislators are mostconcerned with parties’ access to government largess. Inmore developed regions, legislators are less concernedwith pork access and relatively more concerned with ide-ological credibility.

The article proceeds in several steps. First, I presenta formal model of party switching and discusses its em-pirical implications. Then I test the model on the case ofBrazil and discuss broader implications and generaliza-tion to other cases.

A Model of Party Switching

In this section, I build a general model that predicts thefrequency and patterns of party system across differenttypes of political systems. Previous work, both empiricaland theoretical, has focused on building country-specific

explanations of party-membership patterns. I briefly re-view the findings from this literature, then offer a generalmodel that has empirical implications for all democraticsystems.

Most previous work on party switching is empirical,examining explanations for and the impact of switchingin countries where it is frequent. In nearly all cases, how-ever, a common theme is the intersection of institutions,ambition, and constituency characteristics. For example,Mershon and Heller (2004a) link frequent switching inItaly to electoral rules, discipline, and party size, argu-ing that the interaction of discipline and policy disagree-ments prompts MPs to leave their parties. Mejia Acosta(2004) explores switching in Ecuador, explaining vari-ance as a function of district magnitude, party size, andparty ideology. Several scholars have explored the dynam-ics of the LDP’s breakup in Japan. Cox and Rosenbluth(1995) argue that the end of the Cold War and an eco-nomic downturn led to factional splits and defections,especially by electorally marginal parliamentarians. Reedand Scheiner (2002) focus on the behavior of individuallegislators, finding that defection from the ruling party ispredicted by policy and foward-looking institutional pref-erences of legislators, in addition to immediate electoralconcerns.

Two important theoretical contributions are thework of Aldrich and Bianco (1992) and Mershon andHeller (2004b). Both model legislators’ decisions asinterdependent—one legislator’s decision depends onthe anticipated strategic behavior of other legislators.Mershon and Heller (2004b) take an important step for-ward by examining the interaction of legislators and partyleaders. They model party leaders as setting levels of dis-cipline and legislators responding with switch or stayput strategies. They predict cascades—where one switchprompts a series of party-membership changes. Theirmodel is entirely spatial in payoffs and utilities and doesnot fully endogenize the role of party leaders.

Most relevant for this project is the work of Aldrichand Bianco (1992), who model candidates’ decisions tojoin one of two parties prior to an election. They exam-ine the strategic behavior of challengers and incumbentsseeking reelection. Their model includes primary and gen-eral elections and the value of party labels. They find thatcompetition for a party’s nomination can prompt partyswitches, and in the context of declining party strength,will lead to cascades of party defections. Their model isbuilt for the United States’ single-member district, two-party system, and predicts switching in the context of adecaying party or realignment (specifically the collapse ofthe Whigs in the 1850s or the realignment of conservativeSoutherners since the 1970s).

64 SCOTT W. DESPOSATO

TABLE 1 Typologies of Legislative PartySystems

Payoff Type

Club Private

Party Control?No I IIYes III IV

In this section I present an alternative model ofparty membership. My approach is very similar to thatof Aldrich and Bianco (1992), but generalizes their ap-proach to other political systems, allowing for differentkinds of payoffs to membership, different kinds of partystructure, and endogenous party leadership decisions. Inthe following I present a typology of party systems, con-sider the logic of a market for party membership, thenformalize the model and derive empirical implications.

A Typology of Party Systems. I propose conceptualizinglegislative party systems according to the nature of thebenefits that party membership provides and the extentto which parties control access to such benefits, summa-rized in Table 1. The benefits of party membership may beclassified either as private or as club goods. Private goodsare both rival and exclusive, meaning that their consump-tion reduces the amount of that good available to others,and others can be excluded from enjoying the same good.Examples in legislatures often include pork, committeeassignments, and nominations for elected office. Clubgoods fall between private and public goods. They arenonexclusive only for club members, all of whom auto-matically enjoy equal access. For example, one club good isthe electoral value of a party label. All members automati-cally enjoy (or suffer) a party’s reputation or performancein government.2

The second dimension of my typology is the extentto which political parties control access to the benefits ofmembership. In the case of private goods benefits, a partymight make all decisions about distribution. For example,in most closed-list systems, ballot positions for upcom-ing elections may be considered a private good controlled

2Club goods may not be entirely nonrival, however: each additionalmember may slightly degrade the quality of the club good. Forexample, as a party’s size grows, it may become a catch-all party,and its ideological label may lose meaning. New members with verysimilar ideological positions will have minimal degrading effects;legislators with distinctly different or even contradictory positionsmay reduce the value of the party label dramatically.

by the party leaders. In other systems, private goods neednot be controlled by parties. For example, nominations inthe United States are still effectively private goods but arecontrolled by voters in primary elections, not party lead-ers. With club goods, parties cannot restrict members’enjoyment of benefits. Again, all members enjoy a party’sbrand name or reputation. Parties do control enjoymentof club goods, however, when they can restrict member-ship to a subset of legislators, repelling or expelling unwel-come members. The framework proposed by Aldrich andBianco (1992) is a special case of type II, where politicianscompete in a single-member district for a private good (anomination or seat) without any interferance from partyleaders.

Legislators switch party to maximize their expectedcareer utility, a function of the resources they receivefrom their party of choice, less a switching transactioncost. Transaction costs can take many forms, codified inlaw or imposed by informal institutions. For example,Nepal, Ecuador, and Japan have passed laws whereby partyswitchers are expelled from office, losing their mandates.3

Alternatively, transaction costs can be imposed by voters.Where the electorate or party militants are very partisanor otherwise use parties as information cues, switcherswill usually have little credibility and difficulty attractingvotes or campaign support.

Parties will offer resources and invite switchers whenthe benefits of welcoming a new member exceed the costsof resources offered. The value of a new member will varygreatly across systems, depending on political institutionsand voters’ characteristics, but at least two benefits to ac-cepting new members are obvious. First, in all legislatures,size matters. On average, larger parties have more politicalinfluence, more cabinet positions, better committee as-signments, and more pork. The relationship between sizeand resources may occasionally be linear, when resourcesare distributed proportionately. In such a case, each ad-ditional member brings equal value in party resources.But in winner-take-all systems and multiparty coalitiongovernments, the value of an additional member dependson whether he/she changes the balance of power. Second,switchers may bring with them electoral support for theirnew party. Especially popular politicians, often celebri-ties, may significantly increase a party’s vote share. Sucha benefit, however, depends on the electoral context. Vot-ing must be personalistic enough that voters will continueto vote for a switcher and the electoral system must pool

3More recently, party leaders in Ecuador agreed to allow illegal partyswitching to continue so a minority President could increase his leg-islative coalition size. The rule in Japan applies to legislators electedthrough proportional representation and only prohibits switchingto a party that competed in their same district.

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votes, so that other party members will directly benefitfrom the influx of popular support.

Formalizing the Model. When formalized, this logicmakes predictions about the patterns and frequency ofswitching across systems. I illustrate with a simple model,following Aldrich and Bianco (1992). Let a legislature havetwo parties, A and B, and two legislators 1 and 2. Legislator1 starts in party A; legislator 2 starts in party B. Each leg-islator has an additional exogenous characteristic, g i, thatis their contribution or value-added to a club good of theparty they join. For example, a very popular politiciansmight bring votes to a new party. g i need not be positive;a scandal-ridden legislator might have a negative value-added in a party.

Parties have exogenous resource endowments � j andendogenous resource endowments f (G j). � j may be aprivate or club good. f (G j) is a club good enjoyed by allmembers. Its value is determined by f , a strictly increas-ing function and G j , the sum of the g i of all membersof party j : G j = ∑

gi j . When possible, parties exercisecontrol over access to resources by restricting member-ship. Specifically, members of each party cast simulta-neous votes to determine which legislators will be al-lowed to join or stay and which will be refused ad-mission. Party members—themselves legislators in mymodel—cast these votes to maximize their own expectedpayoffs.

Legislators switch party or stay put to maximize theirexpected utility, a function of the resources they will re-ceive in their party of choice, less any transaction costs.Legislator i’s utility associated with membership in partyj is:

ui j = �i j � j + f (G j ) − Ti I j �=home

where � j is party j’s resources, �i j is legislator i’s share ofparty j’s resources, f (G j) is the value of the public goodcontribution of all party members to party j, and T i isa transaction cost paid if legislator i switched party. Theprecise form that payoffs and f (G j) takes will vary withthe specific goods that contribute to parties’ value for and

TABLE 2 Payoffs of Party Membership

Legislator 2

Party A Party B

Legislator 1Party A �1A � A + f (g 1, g 2), �2A � A + f (g 1, g 2) − T � A + f (g 1), �B + f (g 2)

Party B �B − T + f (g 1), � A − T + f (g 2) �1B �B + f (g 1, g 2) − T , �2B �B + f (g 1, g 2)

contributions to legislators, and legislators’ value-addedfor parties.

Two points deserve mention. First, the model is notexplicitly spatial, but can easily capture spatial or non-spatial payoffs. For example, letting � j be party j’s idealpoint, and � i be legislator i’s ideal point, let �i j =− |� j −� i | . Similarly, one could set f (G j ) = n j − ∑ |� j − gi |where nj is the number of members in party j. In this case,legislators’ payoffs are a function of the value of a partylabel � j times their distance from the party. Similarly,parties weigh the added benefit of an additional member(nj + 1) versus the cost of increased ideological dispersion−|� j − g i| when deciding whether to admit legislator i ornot. Second, in this version of the game, parties can onlyinvite/retain or reject/expel members. If payoffs � j werenondiscrete private goods, the model could be relaxed sothat parties set �i j –legislator i’s promised share of partyj’s goods. Effectively parties could make continuous offersto current and prospective members.

The game is played as follows:

1. If parties have control over membership, they simul-taneously decide whether to accept or reject eachlegislator i via majority vote of current members.

2. Legislators make membership decisions—switchingor staying put—and receive payoffs.

3. The game ends.

For the simple case with one legislator per party, thepayoffs of membership for each legislator are summarizedin Table 2. Legislators start in the upper-right hand cell:(A, B). Note that where parties have control over access,a decision to reject a member eliminates that legislator’soptions. For example, if Party A, controlled by legislator1, decides to exclude legislator 2, the first column fromTable 2 is eliminated, and the game is reduced to legislator1 choosing between Party A and Party B.

Virtually any standard game can emerge from combi-nations of parameter values, functional forms, and levelsof party control. When legislators can freely join any party,i.e., parties cannot restrict access, the most common re-sults include:


FIGURE 1 Party Membership Equilibria Strategies - Public Goodswithout Party Control

• Nobody Move: When T is big, both legislators stay putin their current party.

• All Aboard!: when the payoff differential |� A − �B |is big enough, both legislators join the resource-richparty.

• Battle of the Sexes: When f (g 1 + g 2) is big enough andall g i positive, both legislators want to be in the sameparty, but each prefers that other switch and pay thetransaction cost T i. Similarly, when � is a private goodor both g i are less than zero, i.e., each legislator has anegative value-added, legislators may play BOTS butprefer to be in opposite parties.

• Fashion: One legislator prefers to share a party withthe other, but the other prefers to be alone. This resultemerges when one legislator has a sufficiently large pos-itive g i and the other a sufficiently negative one, andleads to a mixed-strategy equilibrium.

• Get out!: Without party control, a legislator with a neg-ative g i, starting in a resource-poor party could jointhe other party and force the other legislator to aban-

don ship. The first legislator could then keep all theresources of the wealthy party for herself.

In the case where parties can reject new members, therange of parameters that lead to switching equilibria ismuch smaller, and some are eliminated entirely. For ex-ample, for BOTS− g i, Fashion, and Get Out!, the resource-rich party will simply reject unwanted new members.4

Figures 1–4 show predicted equilibria for differenttypes of goods �, different degrees of party control, anddifferent values of T and g i, with � = 1 for club goods

4The market for party membership has clear parallels with labormarkets, with three important differences. First, endogenous par-ties, not firms, make personnel decisions. Second, personnel deci-sions are made to maximize members’ utility, not profits. Third,instead of wages, legislators receive payoffs that may be private orclub goods. At this point, the model begins to bear a striking resem-blance to the market for political science faculty: personnel deci-sions are made by majority vote to maximize departmental qualityand payoffs are partly private goods (wages) and partly-club goods(reputation).

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FIGURE 2 Party Membership Equilibria Strategies - PrivateGoods without Party Control

and � = 1n j

for private goods, where nj is the number of

members of party j. Each of the four figures correspondsto one of the ideal system types of Table 1. Within eachfigure, the four plots show equilibria for different valuesof T and G, as labeled. Combinations of � A and �B whichlead to All Aboard! are black, those � that lead to NobodyMove are white, and � that lead to mixed or other switch-ing equilibria are gray. Thus systems with switching havelarge shaded regions; systems where switching is rare havelarge blank regions. Code to produce similar graphs andcalculate payoffs for different types of goods and valuesof all parameters is available on my Website.

Comparing the figures generates predictions aboutthe conditions under which we will observe party switch-ing and the direction of such switching. The most impor-tant of these predictions include:

• Increasing transaction costs eliminates switching .Within all of the figures, moving from T = 0 toT = 2 significantly reduces switching. For example,in Figure 1, compare plot I with II. In I, there is always

unconstrained switching. In the plot immediately be-low that one. the range of � that lead to switching fallsto 64%. A similar vertical comparison of plots in almostall figures yields different percentage changes, but iden-tical results—the range of � that leads to switching fallsin every case.

• Increasing resource differentials |� A − �B | leads to AllAboard! Both legislators join the well-endowed party, withimportant qualifications.Without party control, increasing party resource differ-entials leads to switching as legislators play All Aboardor other strategies, for both kinds of goods. The rangeof � that lead to switching is much larger for club goodsthan for private goods, because club goods are nonrival.With party control and club goods, the impact of re-source differentials is unchanged. An important excep-tion arises with party control and private goods. In thisscenario, all switching is less likely as party resourcedifferentials increase. When parties control valuableprivate goods, they will not share them unless a newmember brings a g i that exceeds the cost of sharing.


FIGURE 3 Party Membership Equilibria Strategies - Public Goodswith Party Control

In the simple illustration, parties only accept switcher iwhen gi >

� j

2 .• Negative g i decrease switching; positive g i increase

switchingWhere parties control access and g i is positive, party jwill accept new member i, except when � j is a private

good and � j

2 > gi . But where g i is negative, parties willalways exclude that member if they can.Where parties cannot restrict membership, a negativeg i reduces the range of All Aboard! and increases theranges of mixed-strategy and other equilibria discussedabove.

Adding more legislators and more parties increases thecomplexity of the model considerably, but the basic im-plications remain unchanged.

An Application to Brazil

In this section, I apply the model to the case of Brazil. Ibegin with an overview of switching in that country. I then

consider the institutional and societal incentives that cre-ate a very fluid market for party membership. Key featuresof this market are relatively low transaction costs, payoffsthat are either club goods or uncontrolled private goods,large resource differentials, and positive value-added formost legislators. Effectively, most Brazilian deputies fallsomewhere in Figures 1 and 3, Plots I and II. The parame-ters of the system create and structure many opportunitiesfor defection from parties.

Switching in Brazil

Brazil has some of the highest rates of party switching inthe world—exceeding one-third of deputies during theaverage legislative session. In some countries, switchingappears to be a short-term transitional phenomenon as-sociated with democratization and the “gelling” of a newparty system or a short-term political realignment. This isnot the case in Brazil: switching is apparently chronic andenduring. Table 3 shows switching rates in the last severallegislatures. During the 49th legislature (1991–94), there

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FIGURE 4 Party Membership Equilibria Strategies - PrivateGoods with Party Control

TABLE 3 Party Switching Rates in the Chamberof Deputies

Legislative Session

49th 50th 51st 52nd∗

Number of Switches 262 212 262 211Switching Rate .52 .41 .51 .41Number of Switchers 198 169 183 153

∗Projected rates for current legislature, as of October 2005.

were 262 incidents of switching, for an average switchingrate of .52 per legislator-term. That figures slips slightly to.41 in the second period, rises to .51 in the third, and risesagain to zzz in the current period. Further, while switchingwas quelled by Brazil’s military regime, it was apparentlycommon during the Second Republic (1946–64) and thereis even evidence of frequent switching during the FirstRepublic (1889–1930; Graham 1990)

Switching has not escaped the attention of studentsof Brazilian politics, though previous work has focusedprimarily on the impact of switching—treating partymembership decisions as an explanatory variable. For ex-ample, Nicolau (1996) examines the impact of switch-ing on party size, finding that switching changes relativeparty and coalition strength in the Chamber of Deputies.He speculates that switching is prompted by ideologicalconflict, personal disagreements, or electoral opportuni-ties, but suggests that separating these empirically wouldbe impossible. Mainwaring and Linan (1997) examinepatterns of switching and party discipline in the Con-stituent Assembly, finding that switchers tend to havelower than average agreement scores in their party of ori-gin, and substantially higher agreement scores in theirdestination parties. Schmitt (1999) examines the impactof switching on reelection rates for legislators, report-ing slight negative effects on electoral success amongswitchers that seek reelection, but without controllingfor strategic candidacies. And Melo (2000) provides a


descriptive look at party switching from 1985 to 1999,finding that switching is more common among conser-vative than leftist parties, though switches from both sidescan traverse the political spectrum. He concludes by chal-lenging the notion that Brazil’s parties can be consideredcohesive or institutionalized.

My goal is to explain party affiliation patterns andshed light on the Brazilian party system. Applying mytheoretical framework to the case of Brazil requires con-sidering the nature of payoffs, transaction costs, and leg-islators’ value-added in the Brazilian context. As I discussbelow, for many Brazilian legislators, transaction costsare very low, value-added is usually but not always posi-tive, and key payoffs of membership are not pure privategoods. Consequently, most parties are willing to acceptnew members, and legislators are prone to switch whenresource differentials are large. There is variance on thesegeneral themes across legislators and parties.

Transaction Costs

Transaction costs are manageably low for many Brazilianlegislators. The legal environment is very accomodating:there are no legal prohibitions on party switching, ex-cept immediately prior to elections for those seeking re-election.5 Until recently, all incumbents were guaranteedrenomination in the next election under the candidatonato or “birthright” rule.6 Further, personalistic votingmeans that switchers can take their voters with them.Partisanship in Brazil is relatively low (Samuels, forth-coming), and most switchers I interviewed expected noor little repercussions in terms of electoral support. Manyseemed to think that voters simply didn’t care about partymembership. In one interview, the legislator’s receptionistwasn’t even aware that he had switched parties!

Some legislators, however, face significant transac-tion costs for switching. A few Brazilian parties have ag-gressively cultivated partisan followings, building grass-roots organizations, promoting cohesive policy platforms,and encouraging partisan, not personal votes in cam-paigns. Most notable of these is the Workers’ Party, or PT,but some smaller parties (including the Green Party) alsohave more ideological popular followings (Ames 2001;Keck 1995; Mainwaring 1999; Samuels, forthcoming) andeven catch-all parties may have a few committed partisansupporters. Legislators with such constituencies can’t take

5Candidates for office must stay in a single party in the monthsleading up to the election.

6This provision was recently eliminated by a court decision but wasin effect for the period covered by my dataset.

their voters with them when changing party and shouldbe much more likely to stay put.

Benefits of Party Membership

Brazilian parties can facilitate access to pork, provide ide-ological or policy benefits, and can directly facilitate elec-toral success. One of the unique features of the Braziliansystem is that the primary benefits of party membershipare either club goods or uncontrolled private goods, fa-cilitating a fluid party system. I’ll discuss the nature ofbenefits and parties’ role in their distribution in the fol-lowing paragraphs.

Pork. A major benefit of party membership is privelegedaccess to state resources. In the case of Brazil, scholars havewidely acknowledged the importance of state resource dis-tribution for deputies’ careers (Abrucio 1998; Ames 2001,1995a, 1995b; Leal 1977; Mainwaring 1997, 1999; Pereiraand Mueller 2004; Samuels 2003). Government resourcescan be channeled into pork projects that provide lucrativeconstruction contracts and needed infrastructure. Cushyjobs in the bureaucracy reward campaign workers andmaintain politicians’ support networks for the next elec-tion. Resources might also be used in less legal ways—fordirect campaign activities or even vote buying.

Public resource distribution is controlled by the ex-ecutive branch, not political parties. For legislators, accessto public funds and resources is maximized by joining thegoverning coalition and voting for the executive’s propos-als. Brazilian Presidents typically use state resource distri-bution to build multiparty supermajority coalitions. Su-permajorities are required because legislators, even in thegoverning parties, are hesitant to support controversialeconomic reforms that impose significant costs on theirconstituents.7 Finally, there are stark differentials in ac-cess to resources across parties. Legislators in oppositionparties are likely to receive significantly less pork for theirconstituents.

Two empirical implications follow. First, governmentparties should retain and attract members, given largeresource differentials and open market for votes andpork. Second, since pork is a rival good, governing par-ties’ attractiveness may decline as the coalition reaches asaturation point.

A similar logic applies to subnational coalitions.Brazil’s decentralized federalism grants subnational po-litical actors—especially state governors—control over

7For the executive, supermajorities may well be cheaper, allowingthe president to pay lower costs on a vote-by-vote basis to buy amajority.

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resources that national legislators covet (Abrucio 1998;Mainwaring 1999; Samuels 2003). State governors’ influ-ence should only be enhanced by progressive ambitionin Brazil. Many national deputies aspire to state and lo-cal elected and appointed positions. Governors directlycontrol key state appointments and can facilitate electionto subnational office by providing campaign resources,endorsements, and selective pork distribution. Conse-quently, governismo—a tendency to join the governingcoalition to enhance resource access—ought to extend tosubnational governments, making state governors’ par-ties more relatively more attractive than state oppositionparties.

Electoral Payoffs. Brazilian parties play a limited, but im-portant role in elections. In many political systems, par-ties provide many electoral resources: campaign workers,financing, consulting services, and meaningful labels tocue voters. But most Brazilian parties play little or no ac-tive role in legislative campaigns—parties do not providecandidates with volunteers, campaign finance, or consult-ing services—candidates must generate these resourceson their own. Party labels are generally not used by mostvoters as information cues; most citizens cast votes basedon candidates’ reputations, not based on their partisan-ship (Mainwaring 1999, 122). But party membership stillcan have an important effect on electoral outcomes. Aquirk in the Brazilian electoral system, open-list propor-tional representation (OLPR), makes election easier insome parties than in others and affects legislators’ affil-iation incentives.8 The OLPR vote-pooling mechanismsallow the minimum number of votes required for electionto vary across party and state. For example, a single, verypopular candidate could draw millions of votes—earningseveral seats for her party. Because of vote pooling, her ex-tra votes could make election easier for other candidateswithin her party.

Consequently, legislators have incentives to switchparty to take advantage of easier electoral quotas. Partieswhere election is easier should retain members; partieswhere election requires more votes should lose members.This should vary with legislators’ own electoral strength.Marginal legislators should be concerned about theirparty’s electoral quotient. Politicians that barely passedthe electoral threshold should seek another party where

8Under OLPR rules, Citizens cast a single vote, usually for an indi-vidual candidate. Seats are distributed to parties based on the totalof votes received by all of the parties’ candidates. Mandates aredistributed to candidates based on the total number of votes eachreceives. See Ames (2001, 1995a, 1995b), and Mainwaring (1999)for more details on OLPR.

they could be elected with a safer margin. At the otherextreme, strong vote getters don’t need to pay any atten-tion to quotients; their election would be assured in anyparty. In interviews, legislators have described these calcu-lations: comparing their own expected vote share with theelectoral quotient in each party and switching to enhancereelection prospects.

Electoral quotas are effectively uncontrolled clubgoods. Enjoying a party’s quota just requires joining theparty. Ballots are unordered, so legislators do not com-pete for list position. And every party has a surplus ofnominations: parties can nominate more candidates thanthere are seats in every district, and rarely find enoughwilling candidates. Consequently, legislators should adoptmembership strategies to take advantage of party quotadifferentials.

Ideological Payoffs. A third component of party affil-iation payoffs is ideological. Membership in a party oflike-minded legislators has several payoffs. Political par-ties can play an important role in helping like-mindedlegislators advance a policy agenda. In addition, a politi-cal party acts as a “brand name,” providing information tovoters about a legislator’s policy positions (Aldrich 1995;Snyder and Ting 2001). Further, membership in an ideo-logically incompatible party can have significant costs.Legislators will be less able to advance their preferredagenda, potentially angering voters and frustrating leg-islator’s own policy goals. Parties might also punish theirless-compatible members—giving them fewer advance-ment opportunities, refusing to support their proposals,or even preventing them from speaking on the floor. Asa result, legislators should prefer membership in ideo-logical proximate parties and avoid those far from theirown ideal points. Ideological compatibility is clearly a clubgood. All legislators enjoy or suffer their compatibilitywith their copartisans. Differentials in ideological agree-ment should prompt legislators’ switching to, or stayingin, the most compatible party.

Pork or Policy .? Legislators may have to balance com-peting desires for state resources and ideological compat-ibility. In such situations, their behavior should reflectconstituents’ demands. Legislators from less-developedregions should prioritize access to state resources to de-liver the public infrastructure their constituents need.Legislators from more-developed regions should bemore responsive to ideological concerns, as basic infras-tructural needs have been satisfied. This logic implies


interacting pork and ideology differentials with an indexof development.

Legislators’ Value-Added: g i

With important exceptions, most deputies have a posi-tive impact on f (G) for most parties. In the Chamberof Deputies, size matters. Most resources are allocatedproportionally: committee assignments and chairships aswell as Chamber leadership positions are a direct functionof party size. In addition, for members of the governingcoalition, commanding additional votes usually translatesinto additional cabinet positions and government jobswhen negotiating with the executive branch. The impor-tant exceptions include the several Brazilian parties thatrely more on their ideological cohesion and policy labelto generate votes than their capacity to generate pork. Forsuch parties, ideologically inconsistent legislators have anegative g i and should be denied admission.

Summary of Predictions

The preceeding discussion offers the following hypothesesregarding party membership in Brazil:• H1: Increasing transaction costs decreases switching.

Legislators with more partisan voters will be less likelyto switch party.

• H2: Increasing resource differentials increases switch-ing into resource-rich parties.State resources: Legislators stay in, or switch into govern-ing parties, but the attractiveness of such parties maydecline as coalition size grows.Electoral Opportunity: Legislators stay in, or switch intoparties with easy electoral thresholds.Ideology: Legislators stay in, or switch into ideologicallycompatible parties.Pork or Policy: Legislators from less developed regionsare most responsive to resource access; legislators fromdeveloped regions are more resposive to ideologicalconcerns.

• H3: Parties exclude legislators with negative value-added.Switchers will be welcomed when their value-added ispositive but excluded when ideologically too inconsis-tent with a party.

Methods

The formal model can be operationalized empirically asa discrete-choice problem. Legislators pick the party that

maximizes their expected payoff, a function of party re-sources less transaction costs. In a multiparty environ-ment, we can write this as:

Uijt = MAX(Ui1t, Ui2t, Ui3t, . . . , Uimt ).

where uijt is legislator i’s utility of membership in party pat time t . When party j is her current party, she stays put.When j is some other party, we observe a switch. I writelegislator i’s utility associated with membership in party jas:

ui j t = �0 + �1 Xi j t − �2Ti I j �=home + �3gi + �i j t .

where Xijt is a matrix of the covariates described above,and �1 is a vector of coefficients. If we assume that the�ipt are independent and identically distributed followingan extreme-value distribution, then this becomes a stan-dard conditional logit model, also known as McFadden’schoice model. Though rarely used by political scientists,the conditional logit has been widely used by economiststo explore individuals’ choices between products, trans-portation options, and, most comparable to this project,migration patterns.9

Measurement

To test my hypotheses, I collected data on party mem-bership, constituencies, and party characteristics for alldeputies during the 49th and 50th legislatures. Estimat-ing coeficients requires measuring the benefits that eachlegislator expects to receive from each party. The unit ofanalysis is the legislator-month, that is, each legislator’smembership choice during each month in office.10

9See McFadden (1973), Maddala (1983), Long (1997), and Longand Freese (2001). Alternative choice models can be implementedwith more flexible error distribution assumptions, but are onlytractable for smaller choice sets and datasets. See Glasgow (2001)for more details.

An alternative, and possibly more accurate, specification wouldincorporate parties’ valuation of legislators separate from deputies’choices—a model where parties first decide whether or not to accepta legislator, then legislators choose from the choice set available tothem. I have a working paper demonstrating how to estimate such amodel, but it proved intractable for this dataset (Desposato, 2005).

10Why is it necessary to use a time-based measure of affiliationdecisions? First, many of the key variables in the model—cabinetformation, committee assignments and leadership, party leader-ship, and even the party of the Presidents—vary over time, as domany of the control variables. During one period, legislator i’s partymight have cabinet access. A month later, after a cabinet reshuffle,legislator i might be in the opposition. Second, the actual member-ship of the Chamber of Deputies is constantly in flux as legislatorsleave and substitutes take their places. Using the legislator-monthas the unit of analysis accounts for the varying amount of time thateach legislator actually served in the Chamber.

PARTIES FOR RENT 73

Dependent Variable: Membership at Time t . The depen-dent variable follows standard practice for choice mod-els.11 Y ijt is legislator i’s choice of party during month t ,coded “1” if the legislator chose party j and “0” otherwise.

Electoral Threshold. I measure electoral payoff differ-entials with Tdiff . I first calculated Threshold for eachlegislator-party combination, coded “1” if legislator iwould have been elected in party j, and “0” otherwise.Finally, I calculate the threshold differential as:

Tdiff = Thresholdij − Thresholdik,

where i references the legislator, j references the prospec-tive party, and k references the current party.

This measure captures both the electoral value of aparty and the marginality of the legislator. Some legis-lators would have been elected in any party—so partymembership does not affect their electoral prospects di-rectly. For such deputies, Tdiff = 0 for all parties. Forweaker legislators, party strength matters—some partiesreduce electoral prospects; others increase them, capturedin the negative or positive values of Tdiff .

State Resources. Measuring the pork and other resourcebenefits of party membership in Brazil can be quite dif-ficult. Because Brazil uses multimember district elec-tions with high district magnitude, scholars cannot eas-ily tie government expenditures to individual legislators.One alternative would be to use budget amendments,but amendments are frequently ignored by the executivebranch and are only a small part of government expendi-tures. In fact, the executive branch at all levels of govern-ment has very strong control over budget development,expenditures, and other components of resource distri-bution (Schneider 2001). Most real access to financial re-sources is gained through individual legislators’ lobbyingof the President and Ministers, consistent with patternsobserved in other countries.

How can we measure access to government resources?Ames (2001) creatively used meetings with ministers asa proxy for pork access. As no such data is available formy time period, I use two unbiased, if crude, proxies forresources access: coalition membership.

• CabDiff = Cabinet ijt − Cabinet ikt .Cabinetijt is coded “1” if party j was part of the presi-dent’s coalition at time t , and “0” otherwise. As above,j references the prospective party and k references thecurrent party.

11See Maddala (1983), Glasgow (2001), Long (1997), and Ben-Akivaand Lerman (1985).

• GovDiff = Govij − Govik

Govij is coded “1” if prospective party j was in the gov-ernor’s office in legislator i’s home state, and “0” oth-erwise.

Ideology. I test the impact of ideological compatibilitydifferentials on party membership using DistDiff ij , therelative proximity of prospective party j versus currentparty k.12 Ideal points are estimated using WNOMINATEmethod (Poole and Rosenthal 1997).

Pork or Policy .? Which of these payoffs matters mostto legislators will depend on the underlying preferencesof their constituents. As a proxy for preferences, I useEducationi, the percentage of legislator i’s constituentswith four or more years of education. I interacted thisvariable with CabDiff, GovDiff , and DistDiff . Educationis highly correlated with other demographic indicatorsof development. A well-known pattern in Brazilian poli-tics, as in many other countries, is that pork, patronage,and clientelism are more common in less-developed re-gioned, and policy promises are likely to be the currencyof politics in more developed regions. CabDiff and Gov-Diff should have their strongest impact in low educationregions; DistDiff should have its strongest impact in higheducation regions.

Transaction Costs. Precisely identifying the partisanshipof each legislators’ vote share is impossible, given the lackof detailed survey data and the high district magnitudein Brazil. We can, however, measure the degree to whicheach party has a partisan following using list votes. Votershave two choices in Brazil: to cast votes for individualcandidates or to cast votes for the overall party list. Thegreat majority (over 90% in 1994) cast personal votes, butthis varies substantially across party. In the center-rightLiberal Front Party (PFL), only about 1% of the voteswere list votes, while the Worker’s Party (PT) receivedalmost 34% list votes. I use two measures of partisanship:Municipal List Voting (Mi) and National List Voting (Ni).For each, I take advantage of the structure of the Brazilianballot: voters can cast votes for individuals or for the partylist.

Mi is the percentage of legislator i’s electoral base thatcast party-list votes. Specifically, I calculated an average oflist voting in the areas where each legislator received votes,weighted by what proportion of their votes were earned

12Specifically, Distanceip is calculated as DistDiff ij = | � i − � j | −| � i − � k | , where � i is legislator i’s ideal point, � j is the centroidof prospective party j, and � k is the centroid of current party k.


there. This measures partisanship among each legislator’ssubconstituency within a district. Ni is the percentageof list votes received by the legislator’s party, based onnational returns. Together, these proxy partisanship. Mi

captures characteristics of the voters in i’s electoral base;Ni controls for the size of a party’s following in aggregate.Because both variables were highly skewed, I used theirnatural logs in all models.

Legislators’ Value-Added: g i. All legislators make a smallpositive contribution to all parties, but deputies that areideologically incompatible will have a negative impact onthe party’s policy label. This implies that a deputy i’s value-added in party j is:

gi = c − |�i − � j |�j

where c is the constant value-added that all parties receive,� i is legislator i’s ideal point, and � j is party j’s centroid,and � j is the standard deviation of the ideal points ofparty j’s members. Thus, being far from a diverse catch-all party (large � j ) is not problematic—the second termis small and g i is positive. But being far from a highlycohesive and unified party (small � j ) is problematic—g i is negative. Unfortunately, this cannot be estimatedseparately from payoffs. The first term, c, is a constant.The second term is too highly correlated with ideologicalcompatibility to be estimated separately. Effectively, thismeans that the DistDiff term must do double duty inthe model—capturing both legislators’ payoffs and theirvalue-added.

Controls. Building on existing work on party switching,Brazilian politics and quantitative methods, I includedseveral additional variables as controls:

• PRN controls for the anti-PRN stigma associated withthat party, as President Collor was impeached for cor-ruption in 1992. PRN is a dummy variable coded “1”for that party from the time the scandal broke until theend of the legislature (August 1991–December 1994),and “0” otherwise.

• Home is a dummy variable identifying legislator i’s cur-rent party, effectively a constant controlling for thebaseline frequency of switching.

• Comit is coded “1” if legislator i was on a key committee,or a committee leader, at time t . Com should have a neg-ative impact on switching: committee assignments arecontrolled by party leaders and may be lost by switch-ing.

• PartyLeaderit : Coded “1” if legislator i was a leader or avice leader of her party within the legislature at time t ,and “0” if she was not. Party leadership provides pres-tige, additional staff and office resources, and influenceover the legislative agenda. Deputies in leadership po-sitions should be less likely to switch.

• Incumbent is a dummy variable coded “1” for incum-bents and “0” for first-term legislators. More experi-enced deputies should be less likely to change party.

• I also included several time-specific variables to controlfor key moments and differences in the legislative cycleand to allow the underlying hazard rate of switchingto vary during the legislative session (Beck, Katz, andTucker 1999).

Results

Tables 4, 5, and 6 show coefficient estimates and predictedprobabilities for models of party affiliation. The results

TABLE 4 Conditional Logit Model of AffiliationDecisions

Model 1 Model 2

Coef. SE Coef. SE

PayoffsThreshold .88 .32∗∗ .89 .32∗∗

Cabinet 1.14 .28∗∗ .73 .09∗∗

Cabinet∗Educ. −.80 .53Governor 1.51 .35∗∗ 1.62 .34∗∗

Gov.∗Educ −1.86 .69∗∗ −2.09 .67∗∗

Ideol Distance −.79 .37∗ −.71 .13∗∗

Ideol Dist.∗Educ .15 .64Transaction Costs

District Partisanship −.40 .07∗∗ −.40 .07∗∗

National Partisanship −.49 .07∗∗ −.49 .07∗∗

ControlsCommittee −.02 .12Incumbent −.19 .13Party Leader −.45 .16∗∗ −.46 .16∗∗

National Campaign −.89 .25∗∗ −.88 .25∗∗

Election Deadline 1.88 .19∗∗ 1.89 .19∗∗

Orgnize Period .91 .27∗∗ .91 .27∗∗

50th Leg. .83 .19∗∗ .81 .18∗∗

PRN −1.30 .31∗∗ −1.33 .31∗∗

Home 12.51 .51∗∗ 12.62 .51∗∗

N 43,286 43,286LL −1981.47 −1983.76

∗.05 ∗∗.01

Cubic spline estimates not shown.

PARTIES FOR RENT 75

TABLE 5 Impact of Selected PartyCharacteristics on PredictedProbability of Membership

Electoral Threshold

Below Above

0.29 0.71(0.18, 0.42) (0.58, 0.82)

Cabinet Membership

Opposition Cabinet

0.32 0.68(0.29, 0.37) (0.63, 0.71)

Ideological Distance

Far Close

.14 .86(0.07, 0.23) (0.77, 0.93)

State Coalition

Education Opposition Governor

Low 0.21 0.79(0.14, 0.31) (0.70, 0.86)

High 0.53 0.47(0.40, 0.66) (0.34, 0.60)

95% confidence intervals in parentheses.

show that my affiliation model fits the Brazilian case quitewell. The supposedly chaotic and antiparty behavior oflegislators in actuality reflects calculated and rational ca-reer moves. In particular, the data suggest that Brazil-ian legislators are seeking distributive, ideological, andsome electoral opportunities, but institutional resourcesare not highly valued. Further, party-switching patternsvary with constituency types. Characteristics of the elec-torate raise and lower transaction costs, and shift legisla-tors priorities between ideology and distributive functionsof parties. I discuss the specific results in the followingparagraphs.

First, there is evidence that legislators use Brazilianparties as electoral vehicles. Brazil’s electoral rules canmake election easier in some parties than in others, andparty affiliation patterns take these rules into account.The coefficient on Threshold is positive and significant:legislators choose parties where vote pooling will facilitatereelection, and avoid parties with thresholds that are too

TABLE 6 Impact of Transaction Costs onProbability of Switching

P(Switch)

National

Low High

DistrictLow 0.061 0.010High 0.013 0.002

high. Table 5 shows the substantive impact: legislatorsmore than twice as likely (p = .71) to choose a partywith an easy electoral threshold than one where additionalvotes are needed for reelection (p = .29).

Second, legislators value ideological compatibilitywhen choosing between parties. Deputies don’t want tojoin or stay in a party that is far from their own policypreferences—the coefficient on Ideol Distance is negativeand significant. The impact is substantial: deputies areabout five times more likely to pick an ideologically prox-imate party than one at the opposite end of the politicalspectrum (p = .86 versus p = .14). In other words, thefarther a deputy is from a party, the more likely she is toswitch away if she is a member, and the less likely she is toswitch to that party if she is not. This finding is evidencethat legislators do care about ideological consistency andcompatibility.

These results would hardly be surprising in mostlegislatures; they are potentially controversial for Brazil-ianists. Brazil’s largest parties have been categorized as“inchoate” and “catch-all”: why should voting coali-tions matter for legislators in such parties? The impor-tance of roll-call compatibility may reflect legislators’own desire to be ideologically consistent, pressure fromparty leaders, or pressure from constituents. Which isat work cannot be parsed out here, but the key pointis that Brazilian legislators do value parties as votingcoalitions.

Third, the analysis confirms the importance of dis-tributive capacity for legislators’ careers; the coefficientfor Cabinet is positive and significant. Legislators in par-ties with access to federal government largess are morelikely to stay put, and switchers are more likely to headfor such parties. When choosing between two otherwiseidentical parties, legislators are about twice as likely topick a cabinet party than an opposition party: pCabinet =.68 versus pOpp = .32. This is consistent with existingwork on the importance of patronage in Brazilian pol-itics (Amorim Neto 1998).


Governors’ Party is positive and significant, and theinteraction of Education and Governor is negative and sig-nificant, as predicted. In impoverished and less-developedareas, voters prioritize governismo—following the stategovernor in exchange for access to state resources. In suchareas, legislators in a gubernatorial party are more likely tostay put, and switchers more likely to make such a partytheir destination. This finding shows that decentralizedBrazil’s state politics spill over into the national arena,affecting party affiliation decisions and coalition forma-tion. These results echo previous research on the impactof federalism on national politics in Brazil (Abrucio 1998;Mainwaring 1999; Samuels 2003), with an important ad-ditional point.

Gubernatorial influence varies with constituencytype. A deputy with a low education constituency is aboutthree times more likely to pick a state governor’s partyover a state opposition party (p = .79 versus p = .21).But among high education constituencies, legislators areeffectively ambivalent between state opposition and gov-erning parties: p = .53 versus p = .47, respectively.13 Inimpoverished and less-developed areas, where voters pri-oritize governismo, legislators align with the state governorin exchange for access to state resources. In more devel-oped areas, voters’ demands for localistic goods decline.This decline reduces the relative attractiveness of state-ruling parties and increases the relative importance ofideological and other factors in affiliation decisions.

The other interaction effects were not significant. TheEducation∗Cabinet interaction is negative, as predicted,but its effect is not significant. It may be that the ben-efits of membership in executive coalitions vary acrossgovernmental levels. Perhaps cabinet membership pro-vides payoffs to legislators with all kinds of constituen-cies, while gubernatorial affiliations are most importantin backward, clientelistic contexts. The other possibilityis collinearity between Governor and Cabinet status—parties in the Cabinet also tend to be parties winning gu-bernatorial elections. I also predicted that the interactionof Distance and Education would be negative—reflectingan increased attention to ideological consistency as vot-ers’ preferences change. However, the interaction effectis small, has the wrong sign, and is not significantly dif-ferent from zero. Two interpretations are possible. Thefirst is that my argument about voters does not apply tovoting coalitions—perhaps all legislators are equally con-cerned with ideological consistency, regardless of theirconstituents’ preferences. The other interpretation is thatlegislators with more educated constituents have already

13All discussions of interaction effects’ significance account for thecovariance between the base and interactive terms.

self-selected into the parties that are ideologically mostproximate.

Finally, the results emphasize the importance of vot-ers in creating strong and stable party systems. Legislatorswith more partisan constituencies are much less likely toever switch party. Table 6 reports the probability that a leg-islator switches party during a four year legislative termas a function of partisanship. In all cases, the choice setis restricted to two identical parties, so these probabilitiescan be interpreted as the impact of random, unobserved,within-party personality conflicts and struggles that causeswitches. The hypothetical party list voting levels are setto 0.6% (low) and 30% (high) which is slightly narrowerthan the actual range of the data. Legislators in less parti-san parties, with personalistic constituencies, have a .061probability of switching during their term, even whenthere are no payoff differentials. At the other extreme,legislators with more partisan electoral bases are very un-likely to switch, with a predicted probability of switchingof just .002 over a four-year period.

The control variables are mostly as expected. Incum-bency may deter switching—its coefficient is negative—though it does not reach conventional levels of signifi-cance. Party leaders, not surprisingly, were significantlymore likely to stay put than nonleaders.

The results also have important implications for par-ties’ internal organization of the Brazilian legislature.Scholars have argued that party leaders’ control of themechanisms of the Chamber of Deputies enables themto enforce discipline and maintain party cohesion. Ofall resources in the Brazilian legislature, party leadershave most direct control over committee assignments.Apparently, however, this control is nearly worthless.Good committee assignments do not deter switching:the coefficient on Com is not distinguishable fromzero.

The time-specific variables did shape switching fre-quency. Legislators were more likely to switch partyaround campaign filing deadlines, and significantly morelikely to stay put during campaigns. The coefficient onOrganize and Deadline are positive and significant, indi-cating that switching is more frequent during the first partof each session when coalitions, committees, and leader-ship are forming, and immediately prior to new electionfiling deadlines.

Discussion

Frequent party switching is usually treated as a simpleindicator of system weakness, but can also provide a

PARTIES FOR RENT 77

powerful and unique window on legislative behavior, al-lowing us to understand the functions that parties servefor ambitious politicians. I built a model of party affili-ations where legislators choose parties to maximize elec-toral, institutional, ideological, and distributive opportu-nities, less a transaction cost for switching. The modeland method could be applied to any system, and whenadapted to Brazil in particular, several findings emerge.

First, legislators in Brazil use parties for electoral,ideological, and distributive ends, but not for institu-tional advancement. Legislators prefer membership inparties that maximize their chances of reelection, thathave more access to pork, but that are also ideologi-cally compatible with their own goals. Ironically, legis-lators’ affiliation choices were not affected by committeeassignments—the one resource that Brazilian party lead-ers firmly control. At the same time, stabilizing pressurecomes from an unexpected source: voters. While previ-ous work has downplayed Brazilian voters’ influence onlegislators, I found that deputies with more partisan con-stituencies face significant defection-deterring transac-tion costs. Legislators with partisan constituencies weresubstantially less likely to switch party than those fromthe least partisan regions and labels.

Further, which factor matters most varies with vot-ers preferences. Higher education voters shift legislators’efforts toward ideological concerns; lower education con-stituencies have other priorities, and their representativesare more likely to emphasize access to government largessin their party-affiliation strategies. Scholars have foundthat parties play various roles in legislative systems, cre-ating policy labels, organizing governments, mobilizingvoters, and providing campaign assistance. The resultsfrom my research show how the roles parties play forpoliticians are not static within a political system but canvary with electorate preferences. More simply, legislatorswith different kinds of constituents use parties to verydifferent ends.

Perhaps most importantly, the results show how rep-resentation works in spite of party switching in Brazil.Party switching may be viewed as a challenge to represen-tation when voters use party labels to cast ballots and pickpolicy platforms. Switching effectively destroys the mean-ing of party labels, raises voters’ information costs, andeliminates party accountability. Switching can be viewedas a threat to the very core of democratic representation.But ultimately, it appears that switching is not the threatit appears to be, at least in the case of Brazil. Where par-tisanship is high and voters rely on party labels to pickcandidates, transaction costs make switching very rare.Further, when legislators do switch, they are likely to moveto a party with a similar ideological position—preservingthe policy value of a vote. Finally, patterns of affiliation

change to match voters’ preferences for different kindsof goods. Where voters prioritize local and particularisticgoods, legislators respond by switching to the parties thatwill maximize their ability to deliver.

My approach should be applicable in other countries.The obvious task is to carefully identify the benefits ofparty membership that could affect legislators’ career util-ity, taking into account each system’s institutions, norms,and transaction costs. Other political systems may offervery different incentives for the frequency and patterns ofparty switching, but based on my results, electoral rules,patterns of legislative organization, and voter partisan-ship and preferences are likely suspects for examination.Just as important, however, is a careful consideration ofthe nature and scarcity of payoffs of party membership.

Am important distinction is the role that parties playin controlling membership and distributing goods. In thecase of Brazil, the primary payoffs to membership are ei-ther club goods or private goods that parties do not con-trol. But where parties do exercise control over resources,scholars will need to account for the interaction betweenparties and legislators.

These distinctions have important implications forthe fluidity of the market for party membership. Whenparty resources are scarce and controlled by parties,switchers need to prenegotiate access to them. For exam-ple, the U.S. House of Representatives’ “winner-take-all”distribution of committee chairships makes those posi-tions scarce private goods. Consequently, representativeshave to prenegotiate their seniority before switching, asdid Billy Tauzin (D→R/LA) before he changed to the Re-publican Party in 1995, and Ralph Hall (D→R/TX) in2004. Hall retained his seniority and committee assign-ments, and Tauzin actually became the Commerce Com-mittee Chair after Thomas Bliley (R/VA) stepped down.

In addition, incorporating strategic party behav-ior also implies broadening our focus from legislators’staying put or switching party to also including partyexpulsions as part of legislators’ and parties’ utility-maximizing behavior. Expulsions, like party-switches, arerelatively rare but not unknown. Legislators have been ex-pelled for corruption and inappropriate use of party re-sources (Mexico and India), failure to close ranks and en-dorse party candidates and positions (United Kingdom),not being a “real communist” (Ukraine), helping partydissidents (Ethiopia), and supporting an unpopular pol-icy (conscription, Australia). There are many other ex-amples.14 Including expulsions will provide a more com-plete picture of the market for parties and legislators

14Indeed, there have even been a handful of recent expulsions inBrazil, nearly all from the ideological leftist parties. There were toofew during the period I studied to incorporate them here.


and also enrich our understanding of parties’ collectivepreferences.15

Future work will face two methodological challenges.First, incorporating parties as strategic gatekeepers, andadding expulsion to their arsenal will require more com-plex methods than those used in previous work and inthis article. Specifically, empirical work in such systemsshould explicitly model the decision to accept or rejectnew members as a first-level selection decision that deter-mines the choice set available to legislators at their deci-sion stage (Desposato, 2005). Second, in other cases theremay be less information available about the payoffs forswitching. If a legislator chooses party 1 over party 2, weknow that U i1 >U i2. But while we may observe legislatori’s subsequent benefits of membership in party 1 (renom-ination, a good list position, ideological compatibility),in some cases we do not have much information aboutlegislator i’s expected list position or renomination statusin a party not chosen. Again, in the case of Brazil, the pri-mary benefits of membership are easy to estimate, evenfor parties not chosen. But in some cases, negotiationson switches that did not happen may be private infor-mation. A Bayesian approach, treating the unobservedcomponents of membership benefit as missing data, or aselection model would solve this information problem.

Regardless, this article shows how party switchingprovides a valuable window on the nature and functioningof party systems. Switching is frequently treated as sim-ply an indicator of system weakness or failure. I’ve shownhere that switching is a systematic phenomenon, best un-derstood as the rational behavior of career-seeking politi-cians in the absence of stabilizing transaction costs. InBrazil, switching has led scholars to describe that countryas dominated by “parties for rent.” My results show thatwhile parties may be for rent, the market for membershipis highly structured, rational, and constrained by bothvoters and institutions. The approach I advocate is eas-ily generalizable and could yield insights for many othersystems.

AppendixAdditional Information on Variables

This appendix provides additional information on thecoding of variables.

15Labor economists have argued that there is effectively no differ-ence between voluntarily quitting a job and being fired or laid off(McLaughlin 1991). Firms would be happy to continue employinglaid-off workers if said workers would accept drastic pay cuts.

The dependent variable is party-membership choiceof legislator i in month t . In a very few cases, legislatorsswitched out of one party but remained without partymembership. If they quickly moved to a new party, I ig-nored their time in no-party’s land. Only a handful ofdeputies failed to ever join a new party, so I excludedthem from the analysis.

If legislators changed party more than once during amonth, I only counted the first switch. Again, almost nodeputies made more than one switch per month. Also, alegislator in theory could start a new party or join a partywith no representation, but practically all deputies movedinto an existing party.

There were several party mergers and splits between1991 and 1998. During the 49th legislature, the PCB be-came the PPS, the PDC and PDS became the PPR, and thePST and PTR merged to become the PTR. In the secondperiod, the PPR, PRP, and PP merged to form the PPB,and the PCB changed its name to the PPS. I did not countany of these as party switches. For example, if a deputyfrom the PDS transferred to the PPR with the rest of hercolleagues, I coded this as a “stay-put.”

I measured constituents’ education level using datafrom the 1990 Brazilian Census, specifically, the percent-age of adults with more than four years of education.Legislators’ constituents’ education levels were calculatedby taking the average education level from each munici-pality where the legislator received votes, weighted by thepercentage of her votes received there:

AvgEdi =n∑

m=1

MuniEdm ∗ Votesim.

Education data came from the 1990 Census. To ac-count for the creation of some 500 new municipalities in1993, I reaggregated vote shares from the 1994 electionback to the 1990 municipal boundaries, then used theseaggregated vote shares to calculate voter-education levels.

I used a similar approach to calculating T1, a measureof the partisanship of legislators constituents. I calculatedthe percent party-list voting in each municipality, then cal-culated an average of these municipal-level partisanshipmeasures, weighting by the percentage of each legislator’svotes received there:

Mi =n∑

m=1

MuniListm ∗ Votesim.

Legislators’ ideal points were measured using thePoole-Rosenthal NOMINATE method (Poole and Rosen-thal 1997). Roll-call votes came directly from the BrazilianChamber of Deputies’ Secretaria Geral da Mesa. The unitof analysis in each case was the legislator-party, i.e., when,

PARTIES FOR RENT 79

a legislator cast votes as a member of more than one party,I estimated separate ideal points for each party member-ship of that legislator.

I also included several time-specific variables to con-trol for key moments and differences in the legislativecycle. 50th Leg is a dummy variable coded “1” for the50th legislature and “0” for the 49th, capturing any changein the overall switching rate and stabilization in the partysystem. Campaign is a dummy variable coded “1” for mu-nicipal and national campaign months. Party-switchingis less likely during campaigns due to party membershiprestrictions for candidates and the virtual shut-down ofthe legislature during campaigns. Deadline is a dummyvariable, coded “1” for the last month when candidatescan change their party before registering to run for mu-nicipal or national office. Finally, Organize is a dummyvariable for the organizational period at the beginning ofeach legislative session, prior to committee formation andthe election of Chamber leadership. This dummy variablecontrols for the increased switching during that period ascoalitions jockey to maximize their leverage in committeeassignments and leadership votes.16 Finally, I included anatural cubic spline to allow the hazard rate for switch-ing to vary during the legislative session (Beck, Katz, andTucker 1999).

For Table 5, I simulated predicted probabilities for ahypothetical legislator choosing between two parties withall variables held constant across parties, except the factorof interest. I report median simulated values and the .025and .975 quantiles for the confidence intervals. For dis-

16Note that all variables in this model are of two possible types.Some variables simultaneously affect the decision to switch andthe choice of new party; other variables only affect the decision toswitch or not. A key distinction between the two is whether the vari-able is a characteristics of the party or the legislator. Characteristicsof parties affect both decisions to switch and destination choices.These variables include Cabinet membership, size, Threshold, Ide-ology, and Major Party. Coefficients on such variables indicate howthe likelihood of joining a party would change if our explanatoryvariable were increased in value.

Characteristics of individual legislators do not, in and of them-selves, tell us much about where deputies might go. For example,freshman should be more likely to switch than incumbents, but thisalone does not tell us where they might go. Similarly, knowing if alegislator is a party leader or not helps us predict whether they willswitch, but tells us nothing about their likely destination.

This is a natural feature of the conditional logit, more fully dis-cussed in Long (1997). In fact, in such models, individual’s charac-teristics cannot be included directly, but only interacted with choicecharacteristics. For this application, legislators’ characteristics in themodel were interacted with Home. A positive coefficient indicatesa greater likelihood of staying in one’s current party; a negativecoefficient suggests the opposite. Education, as discussed, was alsointeracted with Cabinet, Governor, and Distance to test additionalspecific hypotheses.

crete variables, I calculated predicted probabilities for val-ues as labeled in the table: For Governor, Gov=1, Opp=0.For Threshold, Below=0, Above=1. For Cabinet, Opposi-tion=0, Cabinet=1. For the continuous variables, I usedmaximum and minimum values from the sample. Ideo-logical distance was set to 1.4 (Far) and to −1.2 (Close).Finally, Education was set to the maximum and mini-mum values observed in the dataset. Low Education was14% of adults with four or more years of schooling; Higheducation was 82% of adults with four or more years ofschooling. I simulated confidence intervals by samplingfrom estimates’ asymptotic distributions.

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