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.
