Does Partisanship Matter in Brazil? Observational and Experimental Evidence

Since Brazil's redemocratization, debate over the nature of the country's political parties has evolved. Early on, scholars seemed to agree that Brazil's parties were weak and its party system was "inchoate''. This view gained traction partly because it resonated with longstanding sociological and anthropological understandings of Brazilian politics, history and culture. In the last decade and half, however, others have challenged this narrative and suggested that party weakness thesis is exaggerated. In this paper we focus on a critical question for this debate: To what extent have "real" party labels evolved since Brazil's redemocratization? We show that the strength of partisanship in Brazil, at least when it comes to the PT, is comparable to what is observed in other developed and developing democracies and discuss the results from a survey-experiments specifically designed to gauge whether party labels shape the behavior of identifiers, showing that PT and PSDB labels do convey information to supporters of both parties.