This article highlights a new way in which descriptive representation enhances democracy through inclusive party building. We theorize that parties retain and promote incumbents based on gendered criteria, disproportionately incentivizing women to recruit party members. However, gendered resource inequalities lower women’s access to the patronage required for recruitment. Women respond by recruiting more women members, as it lowers recruitment costs, is role-congruent, and eases credit claiming. Using rich administrative data on party membership from 2004 to 2020 and a regression discontinuity design in Brazil, we find that, despite resource disparities, women mayors recruit new members at similar rates as men but reduce the gender gap in party membership. As expected, women are more likely to be promoted in constituencies where they most lower the gender gap in party membership. We also find that women’s increased membership improves party resilience. Our findings suggest that descriptive representation strengthens party building by including underrepresented citizens.

Article

In many democracies, citizens complain that elections do not provide palatable options - none of the candidates are particularly appealing. More candidates implies more choices, and could potentially increase participation. However, too many candidates may overburden voters and thus discourage participation. In this paper, we use election results and experimental data to show that more candidates results in less participation. Effects are apparent even when comparing ballots with two and three candidates. Our results suggest that too much choice on election day can be just as bad as too little.

Article

Party elites may hinder racial and ethnic minorities from winning public office by withholding resources. Prior studies have explored the distribution of money, media access, and party-list positions. In Brazil, party elites provide each candidate with a unique identification number. Voters must enter their preferred candidate’s identification number into an electronic voting machine to register their support. In this article, we replicate and extend Bueno and Dunning’s (2017) analysis of candidate identification numbers. They conclude that party elites do not provide white candidates with superior identification numbers than non-whites. We contend that assessing intraparty variation is theoretically and methodologically warranted. Using party fixed effects, we find that party elites provide non-white candidates with worse identification numbers than whites. We demonstrate that our findings are generalisable using data from other elections. Moreover, we show that party elites also withhold advantageous numbers from women and political novices.

Article

How does the number of candidates competing in an election affect voting behavior? In theory, as the number of candidates running for office increase, citizens’ utility from voting also increases. With more candidates, voters are more likely to have candidates that are close to their ideal points. Practically, however, more candidates also means a higher cognitive burden for voters who must learn more during campaigns in order to find their “ideal” candidate. In this paper, we examine how choice set size affects voting behavior. Using a survey experiment, we show that subjects presented with many options learn less about candidates, are more likely to vote based on meaningless heuristics, and are more likely to commit voting errors, when compared with subjects who choose between only a few candidates.

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Under what conditions does local incumbency help a party recruit new members? In this article, I use a regression discontinuity  design to study the consequences of municipal incumbency for party membership recruitment in Brazil, and I find that the effect of incumbency on grassroots party-building is conditional on the party’s prior level of institutionalization. Municipal incumbency increased membership recruitment only among centralized and programmatic parties that already had a well-established organizational presence in the municipality, and it was ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive for weaker parties. I also find evidence that the incumbency advantage for institutionalized parties is only partly explained by patronage, and incumbency also helps these parties recruit high-intensity members who seek to participate in the party and who remain affiliated with the party even when it is no longer in power.

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How do new political parties grow? This paper investigates how infant parties leverage the social networks of their early activists to attract new followers during the earliest stages of party-building, when most alternative party-building strategies are not yet available to the party. Drawing on novel social network data and neighborhood-level data, the paper’s analyses trace the early membership growth of the Chilean political party Democratic Revolution in several different types of social networks. I find that unaffiliated voters were more likely to join this party if they were socially connected to one of the party’s early activists. I also find evidence that the presence of early party activists in a given community eventually strengthened the party’s electoral and partisan support in the community as a whole and influenced the party loyalties of neighboring communities. Together, these findings highlight the important role that social contagion plays in early party-building.

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Although several major Latin American parties have lost a large share of their partisan supporters since the 1990s, the speed and depth of these declines in mass partisanship has often varied widely across different localities and voters. This paper attributes this variation to the important role that local politicians, party activists, and other low-level party actors play in sustaining voters’ partisan loyalties during crises for the party’s national reputation. Using municipal-level and individual-level data from Chile and Brazil, I find that the presence of local politicians and activists in a community or social network can reinforce voters’ partisan loyalties and mitigate the negative effects of scandals on mass party identification.

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