Socioeconomic Development, Institutions and Parties: Explaining Party Membership in Latin America

• Grant number: 17/21519-5
• Support type: Regular Research Grants
• Duration: June 01, 2018 - November 30, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Behavior
• Principal Investigator: Pedro José Floriano Ribeiro
• Grantee: Pedro José Floriano Ribeiro
• Home Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated grant(s): 18/19925-8 - Explaining party membership in old and new democracies: institutional and demand-side variables, AP.R SPRINT

Abstract

The formation of party attachments is an important factor for the institutionalization of party systems and for the consolidation of new democracies (Mainwaring and Torcal, 2006). The decline of party membership is seen as part of the broad decline in traditional modes of political participation. Both are commonly explained by using survey-based/individual-level data to highlight individual resources (such as education, income, age and sex), beliefs and attitudes as the main explanatory variables - emphasizing the 'supply' of individuals to participation. The first objective of the project is to mobilize socioeconomic, institutional and party variables, aggregated at the local level, to understand the variation in membership levels (ratio members/electorate) across the 5570 Brazilian municipalities. We will use mainly official data, provided by IBGE and TSE. The project highlights systemic socioeconomic factors that structure the context of participation - something that has been understudied in recent literature, according to Pippa Norris (2007). At the same time, we assess the impact of institutional variables and the party 'demand' for human resources - factors that have been also neglected (van Haute and Gauja, 2015). The second purpose is to expand the analysis to other Latin American countries (Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Uruguay), where data gathering and data reliability on party membership still place barriers to researchers. According to the most recent surveys, about one-third of the continent's voters identify with some party (Carlin et al., 2015; Nadeau et al., 2017) - surprising numbers, given the fluidity of party systems in the region. In this sense, the project has a multi-level design: a cross-sectional analysis of subnational data in a country at a given moment (Brazil, certainly; other countries depending on the data), combined with a cross-national analysis between selected countries, with national-aggregated data. (AU)

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

RIBEIRO, PEDRO FLORIANO; BORGES, ANDRE. The populist challenge: Multi-level electoral coordination in Brazil's 2018 elections. REGIONAL AND FEDERAL STUDIES, v. 30, n. 3, p. 363-386, 2020. Web of Science Citations: 0.

RIBEIRO, PEDRO FLORIANO; DO AMARAL, OSWALDO E. PARTY MEMBERS AND HIGH-INTENSITY PARTICIPATION: EVIDENCE FROM BRAZIL. Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), v. 39, n. 3, p. 489-515, 2019. Web of Science Citations: 0.