The Brazilian Workers' Party: Themes and Issues in 30 Years of Research on the PT

This paper reviews and critiques three decades of comparative political science research on the Workers' Party (PT). As the most influential and best-organized left-wing party of the Third Wave of democratization in Latin America, the PT has inspired voluminous research. We retrace four phases of the literature on the PT: formation and consolidation of the party in the late 1970s and early 1980s, early experiences at subnational governance from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, the transformation of the party while in opposition during 1995-2002, and finally the experiences of national power in the Lula and Dilma governments (2003-present). We conclude the paper by arguing that there are currently three deficits in the literature on the PT experience: authentic attention to ideational factors, the role of leadership, and the impact of external factors such as the experience of left-wing parties in power elsewhere.