Affiliates and High Intensity Participation in Brazilian Parties: Opening the Black Box

What are the conditions for the high-intensity engagement of Brazilian affiliates? As this is a topic little explored in specialized literature, the objective of this proposal is to analyze the patterns of activism and political culture of municipal leaders who dedicate more than 20 hours a month to the party (Whiteley and Seyd, 2002). The proposal evaluates the most common variables to assess this pattern of engagement, i.e., the possession of material and cognitive resources and the interest in collective and process incentives (Speck, 2013; Ribeiro, 2013; Speck et al, 2015, Cervi et al , 2020; Paludo, 2017; Paludo et al, 2018; Ribeiro and Amaral, 2019) and others absent with explanatory potential, i.e., ideology (Scarrow, 2015) through the elaboration of an exclusive survey with 2751 municipal leaders from 32 national parties . Therefore, this proposal aims to clarify how high-intensity participation and its consequences can stimulate distinct patterns of internal and external activism in Brazilian municipal party bases. Thus, it fills three gaps in this agenda. The first is methodological, advancing the discussion of the use of a research technique little used in national political science, the survey (Figueiredo et al, 2021). The second is empirical, and refers to the lack of data on affiliates (Ribeiro and Amaral, 2019). The third is theoretical, it involves systematizing the literature on membership and affiliation, called the "poor cousin" of Brazilian party studies (Cervi, Terron and Soares, 2020). This project challenges the traditional academic view that Brazilian parties are notary (Mainwaring, 2001; Samuels and Zucco, 2018). It proposes as an alternative a more considered argument, focusing on membership as a measure of social rooting, assessing whether in fact the party on the ground is fragile in relation to other party faces, the public office and the central office. To achieve this, this project combines the theory of high-intensity participation, survey data and evaluates the degree of activism of municipal leaders prior to the electoral period, postulating the following hypothesis: high-intensity participation by Brazilian municipal leaders is associated with the possession of resources cognitive, collective incentives and the sense of political efficacy. Due to the positively deviant pattern of the political culture of Brazilian municipal leaders in a comparative perspective, this proposal suggests that there is life within national parties and the need to reconsider the thesis of their chronic fragility.